Outside Of Time
by BridgetMatthieu
Summary: Months following Rimmer's departure, the boys from the Dwarf receive strange distress signal from their old friend in the form of a mad-man with a blue box. R/L
1. Chapter 1

While Dave Lister wasn't remotely as bothered as Kochanski by the decaying state of the decorated steel green "skip with thrusters" that was Starbug, worn and battered by years of crashing, ill-advised manoeuvres and alien hostility, he couldn't deny that the rotten atmosphere occasionally began to close in on him, especially with Rimmer's departure. He thought that he'd enjoy the emptiness, but now ever quarter felt like it was closing in on him or sprawling to far for him to see, as if Kryten, The Cat and Kochanski were years away from him at any given time, and even if he hauled himself over the mountainous squalor, he'd always be alone and strangely enclosed in filth. While the JMC were frugal enough to put Rimmer himself to shame and the ship boasted a number of faults and shortcomings, Red Dwarf had a certain quirky slapdash charm to it that was absent aboard Starbug, which seemed to have taken the brunt of maintenance cutbacks. It was suffocating aboard the ship.

Lister never thought for a minute that he could ever miss one person so much. Certainly, he missed humanity as a whole, he missed the feeling of knowing that there were hundreds and hundreds of other people like him at any given time, going about their daily lives, laughing with their loved ones, experiencing things in a human way, he missed that intensely. The uncertainty that usurped it was agonising. But never did he think he could feel such a desperately agonising desire for the company of one single person. One single person who had been dead for three million years. He had thought his want for Christine Kochanski was the extent of how much he could miss one person, but he'd been proved so direly wrong. It confused him profoundly that when he finally felt this specific impassioned aching, it was for Arnold J. Rimmer. He'd always tried to convince himself that he'd pay obscene amounts of money to be moved to a different bunk room back in his early days aboard the JMC craft, but glossed over the fact that he'd never complained to the higher ups once. He'd never requested to be moved even though the offer had been presented to him multiple times, and he was well aware that bunks were going free with some regularity, homesickness and cold feet ran riot aboard Red Dwarf. He continued to subject himself to board with a man he so vehemently insisted that he couldn't stand, even when every bunk on the ship was free except for theirs in that scruffy little dormitory.

Lister very vividly recalled his first day on Red Dwarf, hugging his parents tearfully goodbye at the space vehicle docking in London before filing on board with a plethora of crew members, the large gangway slamming ominously closed behind them, locking them in to this giant, malnourished floating city. Luggage clutched to his chest, he recalled being lead by a senior officer with a group of other technicians to one of the middle decks after a fairly drawn out lift ride and being shown to his room. While busying himself with unpacking his guitar and pouring water into his robotic goldfish tank, a man of his age strode in behind him and deposited his own meticulously packed luggage on to the bottom bunk. Lister turned and examined the man and his mother ironed collection of polo shirts that he was laying out on the bed linen. He was a tall, upstanding man with a gently defined jaw, russet eyes and painstakingly treated hair, somewhat military in it's pedantic keeping. He had extended a hand to this man, but was greeted with an elaborate salute instead of a shake. He noticed a slight scrunch in his nose when the man registered his curry stained logo tee.

"Arnold J. Rimmer, pleasure to meet you!" the young man had announced. Lister raised an eyebrow at his new bunkmate Arnold, scanned him with disbelief at how tightly wound the man seemed, and returned his extended hand to his pocket with a nod, chewing gum wedged in the corner of his wonky smile.

"Dave. Dave Lister. Pleasure."

It had been anything but a pleasure, the two of them discovering each others habits and foibles, the most difficult way possible. They couldn't be more opposed if they tried and oh how they tried. Lister would do anything if he knew that Arnold wouldn't. That was why he kept sandwiches that he never intended to finish for weeks, why he deliberately smeared soap and toothpaste over the mirror, why he neglected to treat his sock basket despite the alarmingly pungent smell. He'd never entertained once that this peculiar obsession with irritating Arnold Rimmer would develop into a strong attachment. And little did either of them like to admit it, but they genuinely had fun together. Neither of them would ever put it past one another that they loved playing chess together. Lister loved it when Rimmer would cheat or play exclusively defensively, and Rimmer loved it when Lister called him out on it. Lister loved having Rimmer put his name down on report for stupid things like whistling and breathing, he provoked Rimmer, not that he needed much excuse because he was more than happy to put his name down. They'd been through so much together, they'd never been separated for such a long period of time and now Lister knew he was gone. He knew that if he ever saw Arnold again, he'd be a tiny yellow blip in an asteroid belt of dead Rimmers. The very notion drove him to the brink of insanity.

* * *

Lister scraped his hands through his hair frantically with an exasperated groan, shooting up from his bunk and storming to the main deck. He found Kryten working behind the kitchen counter, merrily preparing onions for a stew that evening. No sign of Kochanski or Cat, but Lister didn't feel particularly inclined to ask. Kryten immediately halted his onion dicing upon Lister's entry, his synthetic eyes igniting his joy expectantly as if he had terrific news to share.

"Mr Lister sir!" He chimed. "How lovely to see you, I'd just began on dinner, coq...well, space weevil au vin, with recyc-red wine, I thought that since Mr Rimmer was no longer here I'd be able to start cooking these things again without him getting all upset like he would. We only have a finite supply of organic meat left, wouldn't want to waste it all now when there are these perfectly good weevils scuttling around in the lower decks"

Lister sighed heavily. "You know how I feel about things that scuttle Kryten."

"Did I say scuttle? It was really more of a...skittering..."

"Skittering is no good either, no skittering, no crawling, no scuttling, no slithering, no slipping, no mincing, no prancing, no sashaying. We'll just have it with carrots or aubergine or something." Lister vaguely gestured in no particular direction, making his way towards the fridge.

"They'll be space aubergines sir." Kryten adopted an earnest tone. Lister bent down, swung open the fridge and fetched himself a can of beer, which he cracked open with a small burst of suds splattering his face and t-shirt, to no reaction.

"'Space aubergines'? Where the hell do you get 'space aubergines'?"

"Well, at the GELF colony, during your wedding night-"

Lister grimaced. "Oof, Kryten, I don' wanna know man. I'll go hungry."

"...Hungry sir?" Kryten concluded a few solid minutes of silence. "You...don't want anything?"

Lister glanced forlornly up from his beer can and shook his head. Kryten ardently placed his cooking utensils on the chopping board with a sniffle.

"Oh! Mr Lister, what ever is the matter?" Lister didn't answer, taking a conveniently timed swig of beer. Kryten noticed and frowned, shaking his head rapidly spluttering out hurt tuts and appeals to a robotic deity. Kryten had noticed Lister's steady decline after Rimmer had left, the slow increase in the amount of beer that he was drinking, his despondency, he spent so much time confined to his room, lying on his bunk and staring at the ceiling but this was the final straw for Kryten. He'd known him for a good seven years and not once had he said that he wasn't hungry. He'd ducked out of meals occasionally to spend an hour chasing around voluptuous computer sprites in a 19th century London generated by the AR suite, but even then he usually turned up to feast on the cold scraps later. Never had he simply not been hungry.

"Should I take you on the Rimmer experience again, sir?" Kryten asked cautiously. Lister shook his head and scrunched his nose in disgust.

"Ugh, no. I keep telling you to throw that bloody thing away. It's not Arn anyway."

"Arn?"

"Rimmer!"

Kryten cast his eyes downward solemnly and resumed chopping onions with a noticeable absence of enthusiasm. He continued to talk without taking his eyes off his culinary duties.

"I know that you're missing him." Lister remained silent, finger tracing the icy metal rim of the beer can. He released a resigned sigh.

"I can't take this any more Kryten, I'm going mad without him. What Chris said, about him...about him keeping me sane...I think she was right. I need him."

"Well, that all sounds terribly passionate." Kryten commented wistfully.

"I guess you could call it that, yeah." Lister chuckled a little, although it was tinged with bitterness. "See the thing is Kryters, I thought I'd be overjoyed when he was gone, I couldn't stand the smeghead, he was always so tidy, so up his own arse, spending all day categorising his socks by how worn the elastic was. And the way he always used to go on and on and on about the Napoleonic wars and..." He mockingly drew out the word wars in a sing song voice, before pressing his beer can to his forehead and sighing. "I miss that. I miss all of that."

"Well, who knows sir!" Kryten attempted to alleviate the morose cloud that hung over the main deck. "He may drop by some day, Ace Rimmer."

"What reason would he have to? He has everything out there, women, looks, charisma."

"Not yet sir" Kryten reminded him. "I think it will take him a while to acquire those skills from his predecessor"

"Yeah maybe." At that moment, Kochanski and Cat strode on to the main deck in unison, both looking considerably perky in comparison to their sub-human and mechanoid ship mates. Kochanski had something of a heightened sensitivity to the atmosphere, her attitude immediately faltering the minute she stepped in to the room, whereas Cat, more fashion than tact, simply ignored it and shuffled to the table, where he sat himself down and took a long swig of Lister's beer to little reaction from the latter. Kochanski moved slowly in to the chair beside Lister and rested a hand delicately on his shoulder, her bottom lip protruding in comforting concern. She rubbed Listers back affectionately, which did manage a smile from him if only briefly. She didn't ask him what was the matter, she was perfectly aware.

"Cheer up Dave." She cooed. "Get some food down your neck, then I'll watch some telly with you. How does that sound?" Lister's heart warmed at the gesture.

"That sounds nice Chris." He spoke lowly. "I'm not all that hungry."

"You've got to eat something, you didn't have much for breakfast. Just a little bit...Look! Kryten's gone to so much trouble to make us something nice with limited supplies, the least you could do is have a tiny plate, hm?" She gestured to Kryten who reluctantly accepted the compliment.

True to her word, Kochanski was very zealous in keeping Lister company that evening, she sat in bed with him, gave him extra pillows and made him several cups of hot tea in a heart-warming attempt to keep his spirits up and Lister would be lying if he said that it didn't improve his mood somewhat. As he sat there, late in the evening with a fast asleep and fully clothed Kochanski hanging precariously from the edge of his bed, television flickering dimly in the dull evening light, Lister found himself reaching for a polaroid stuck above his head, a polaroid of him and Rimmer together that Peterson had taken candidly at the disco, the angle and the happenstance of their expressions making it appear as though they were having a particularly intimate conversation when in reality they had probably just been bickering over the frequency of Rimmer's space corps regulation reciting. He slid back on to his multitude of pillows and rested the picture flat upon his face. He knew that he was unwell.


	2. Chapter 2

Lister would probably have taken some little comfort in knowing that there was some-one out there as impossibly lonely as he was, if not more so. Not that invalidated his loss, but Lister had the virtue of experiencing only one, despite it being a rather severe one. Little did he know that there was a man, or a being who resembled a human male who experienced the exact some loss on far to frequent an occasion. And like the unfortunate boys and one girl from The Dwarf, this very man was cast adrift in space in a space ship that had seen far better days, alone and ill with isolation. Said man trudged around his console, disinterestedly flicking switches and turning dials and taps, blankly checking screens.

"What year, what year, what year is a good year..." He mused aloud to himself. "60s...could go to the 60s, no why would I want to go to the 60s, nothing there but turmoil and rock and roll and mini skirts...Could go to the 19th century, ugh no, too much sewage, who wants to deal with all that..." He irritably tapped the edges of the hexagonal console that centred his ship. "I'll go for broke. Take me somewhere new, sexy!" He announced to seemingly no-one in-particular before throwing a few switches haphazardly and allowing his infinitely small capsule of a ship to catapult itself riotously into an uncertain void of time and space. The man stumbled around the ships core with a exhilarated laugh.

"'Atta girl!" He screamed. "This is more like it!"

His eye suddenly caught the main screen of the ships computer which was incessantly alerting him of an incoming transmission. A little wobbly on his feet with the speed and recklessness of his ship, he stumbled to the screen and twiddled a dial.

"Doctor speaking, come in."

"Doctor who might I enquire?" The man on the Doctor's screen was a relatively young one, light bronze hair swept across his forehead, strong broad shoulders and an irresistible smirk, although his charming countenance was troubled by smears of blood and laboured breathing through his perfectly aligned teeth. He seemed like a very classic action hero.

"Just The Doctor" he replied. "Who am I speaking to?"

"The name's Ace. Ace Rimmer. That's a damn fine ship you got there, Doctor, never seen anything like it. And a damn fine bow tie, you look like a man of trends, very fresh and relevant, when the fashionable people of the world don't know what to do, they look to you." The Doctor smiled to himself, proudly adjusting the tie around his neck. He couldn't help but be reminded of an old friend of his by the man on his screen, an old friend with a similar brazenly charming attitude.

"Thank you Ace!" He beamed. "Now, what can I do for you?"

"Seems I've gotten myself in something of a caper, I'm rapidly loosing control of my ship and I couldn't think of anyone finer to help me out of scrape than you, Doctor"

"I like you Ace, you know precisely who is who" The Doctor commented with a smirk. "Just a sec, I'll see if I can get you on to the TARDIS."

"Not familiar with that term old chum, do you think you could give me the shimmy?"

"Time And Relative Dimension In Space." The Doctor announced proudly.

"Sounds like quite a vessel."

"Certainly is, locking on to you now, Ace!" The Doctor leapt away from the screen to fiddle with more dials when suddenly the TARDIS lurched violently, sending him crashing to the grated floor. Frazzled, he looked up. Warning sirens and lights were blaring like he'd scarcely heard before, and a crackled voice continued to sound through the ship's main display panel. It didn't sound like Ace's voice anymore, his previously smooth and refined cadence had become somewhat more blunt and nasal.

"Look, Doctor, you have to help me, I don't know where this ship is going, they may not be able to reach me, find the crew of Red Dwarf. Do you hear me Doctor? Red Dwarf! Red Dwa-"

The airwaves went static, as the TARDIS lurched and spun wildly, sending the Doctor staggering in several directions.

"Red Dwarf? Red Dwarf!" He exclaimed. "A city-sized Jupiter Mining Corporation ship that went missing in 2044! Of course, how could anyone forget that, the thing was sent on a simple 18 month mining expedition and then disappeared in to deep space, crew and all, with hardly a trace! Oof, so much controversy, I like controversy! But what to do about our friend Ace?"

* * *

"Mr Lister sir! Mr Lister!"

Lister rolled over and groaned, a mouldy taste in his mouth and impaired vision. Kochanski was gone, safe to assume she'd either woken up or Kryten had put her to bed, seeing as he wasn't entirely too keen on the idea of the two of them spending an extended period of time together at night. Kryten was stood beside him with an elegant pewter tray, laiden with a banquet fit for a sultan, all of his favourite curries presented in individual ornately shaped pots, a stack of poppadoms and a cruet of various condiments, such as yoghurt mint sauce, chopped onions in spices and mango chutney to accompany the freshly baked slab of naan bread, served above a gourmet vindaloo. Lister could tell that Kryten had worked his fingers to the exoskeleton to provide him with a decent meal in light of dwindling supplies, even going to far as to present the meal as though he were serving the Queen of England on a pilfered silverware set that they'd found on a ship several months ago, but had had little use for until now.

"Good morning!" Kryten placed the tray beside him and smiled heartily. "Breakfast is served!" He reached for the opulent silver teapot and poured cold lager in to a china cup which he handed to Lister. His appetite had improved significantly since last evening, so he accepted the food and drink with much gusto. He saw a wave of relief wash over Kryten's face.

"Morning Kryten..." Lister yawned, spooning mango chutney on to the naan bread. "Anything to report?"

"Not much as of yet sir, although the Cat smells something rather unusual that he can't quite put his finger on. That could mean anything from rogue simulant battle cruiser to incorrect application of hair gel this morning." Kryten released a breathy chortle.

"Right."

After finishing his meal, Lister saw fit to make his way up to the bridge and to see if anything would come of the Cats smell. He made a concerted effort not to try and attach Rimmer to every single odd occurrence on the ship but he couldn't help himself. Every time and kind of ship or life form blipped into being on Starbugs scanner, a tiny part of him clung to the hope that it was Rimmer, that he needed their help or that he was returning to them, even if just briefly. The Cat was fast asleep at the helm, deep in to what would be one of multiple snoozes that day, at which Lister rolled his eyes and slumped in to the secondary pilot seat, staring at the empty void in front of him with a soft groan. With no warning, the whole scape suddenly burst in to life before him, startling the cat awake and sending him flying backwards out of his seat, crashing to the floor with a resounding thud. This brought a panicked Kochanski on to the main bridge, where she quickly assumed her seat that had once been Rimmers and began to survey the monitors with concern, taking little heed to the rattled Cat and Lister heaps sprawled across the floor. The whole bridge shuddered tempestuously, as she stared up at the orange and black wormhole opening up in from of them.

"My god!" She cried. "We're trapped in some kind of vortex!"

Lister clambered to his feet with some amount of effort, his bones aching as he slumped back in to the pilot seat.

"I can't steer!" He yelled. "We're spirally out of control!" He tugged frenziedly at the controls to no avail. He then noticed something small, something only a little big than a standard London phone box and differing in colour wheeling towards the ship and tremendous speed from the other end of the vortex.

"CHRIS, CAT, LOOK OUT!" He screamed, launching himself from the chair and taking Kochanski's arm, flinging her briskly on to the main deck and under the table before clearing the bridge himself, the cat narrowly following behind him as the blue box embedded itself in to Starbugs nose with gargantuan force, sending an impact wave across the little green ship that sent all four crew members wheeling backwards in to a wall, the re-enforced window to shatter as if it were common glass and every piece of furniture that wasn't bolted down to overturn. Lister's head pounded, he'd caught something quite severely in his fall and could already feel his vision begin to blotch and his grasp of his surroundings begin to fail him. All he saw was the tall-ish gangly figure of a man forcing open the door of the blue box, stepping cautiously down over the control panel and on to the bridge shakily.

"Haha, oops!" He heard the man announce, before he was enveloped by the darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

Lister woke with a start at the biting sensation of a icy wet wash cloth being placed on his forehead, catapulting himself upright and causing a rather frazzled looking Kochanski to leap back in surprise with a small exclamation. He grabbed the wet towel and held it up to Kochanski.

"What the smeg did you think this was going to do for a minor concussion?"

"...It's...what they do in films..." Kochanski shrugged with a playfully dismissive smile. Lister shook his head at her. Regardless of her navigational prowess, she'd never been particularly adept medically, but then again neither had any of the crew of Red Dwarf. Common colds used to turn the entire ship into a biological war-zone. He looked around. The room was recognisable as his quarters, in something of a disarray from the impact of the strange ship. He and Kochanski were alone at the present. Head still pounding, Lister slumped back in to a horizontal position with something of groan. Kochanski pursed her lips, glancing at her lap which she clasped her hands in before opening her mouth motionlessly for a while as a nervous prelude to her speech.

"Well, as you probably well gathered, we had a little bit of a crash." It suddenly returned to Lister then, the man he'd seen carefully stepping down over the control panel and on to the main bridge of Starbug, the strange lack of vacuum when the window was broken upon impact, the wormhole that their ship had found itself sucked in to before it collided with what seemed like a renegade blue phone box in space.

"A crash!? Who with? Who is on the ship Chris?" Lister sat bolt upright again, faltering a little as his head injury and eagerness briefly speckled his sight. Kochanski leaned and placed a hand on his shoulder, gently guiding him back down.

"A man who calls himself The Doctor, I must say that ship of his quite remarkable! It's absolutely gargantuan on the inside, I had a quick peek." She said with soft admiration, gesturing with both her hands to emphasize her point. "You've only been out for about five minutes tops so we haven't gathered much about him yet, Kryten and the Cat are talking to him now, he seems a little bit...quirky, to say the least" Lister finally managed to maintain verticality and swing his legs over the side of the bed, marching briskly towards the bed. Kochanski quickly gave chase to the fiercely determined Lister, scuttling along beside him nervously and flapping her arms slightly.

"H-he doesn't mean any harm Dave! T-the crash was a complete accident, he has no idea how it happened!" Lister refused to answer, striding on to the main deck where he saw the three of them sat around the main table. The Doctor was there, his gaunt, square face turning to greet him with a slightly gormless and childlike smile, as if Lister had just walked in with his arms full of new toys.

"Mr Lister sir!" Kryten exclaimed in a chirpy voice. "This is the Doctor!"

"I know." Lister crossed his arms. "Chris said."

"This is...absolutely unbelievable!" The Doctor sprang from his seat with boundless energy, causing the crew to flinch. "The last surviving crew members of Red Dwarf -which appears to have scarped- still alive 3 million years later! This is too surreal, I love surreal!" He bounced up to Lister, feeling the side of his arms and the contours of his face with the fascination of someone who'd never seen a human being before at which Lister recoiled a little, puzzled by this man's enthusiastic behaviour when there was seemingly nothing cheerful about either of their predicaments. "Damn, you look good for someone in their 3 millions! I hope I look as good as that when I'm your age! Although I don't think I look bad now if I do say so myself" The Doctor stroked his chin and suddenly stared right through Lister as if he were looking at himself in a mirror and then twirled round with an exuberant clap, grinning relentlessly.

"Excuse me, I don't know who you think you are but you crashed your box in to our navigation panels, you've knocked out a good portion of our equipment!" Lister gestured angrily to the bridge. He paused briefly. "Where...where are you from?"

"Galifrey, I-it's a while away." The Doctor flapped his hands in a flighty manner. "But that isn't important! You are the crew yes, the surviving crew?"

"That's us. The Boys from the Dwarf." Lister nodded to Cat and Kryten, who flopped their hands about in a gang sign-esque manner. "And one girl." Kochanski simply smiled and managed a brisk, stiff raise of the hand.

"A-haw, brilliant! Brilliant brilliant!" The Doctor clenched his fists with excitement. "I've been sent here by a strapping young fellow who appeared to me upon my console. He seemed to be in a spot of bother."

Listers heart stopped.

"...Who?" He asked flatly.

"A fellow going by the name of Ace Rimmer." Lister felt all eyes on him, anxiously awaiting his reaction. When put on the spot in such a manner he couldn't help but feel a slight stage fright, any visceral reaction slowly dying in his viens, cooling in to something nervous and calm.

"Ace Rimmer?"

"You know him!" The Doctor exclaimed.

"He's a friend of mine, yes." Lister's voice quivered a little.

"Right, well, he sent me a distress signal which if I'm not incorrect came from a very odd point in time...yes...Oh, he's in quite a bit of trouble!"

"Wh-what happened to him?" Lister's volume raised slightly.

"I could tell you, but I think it would be much more lucrative for you..." The Doctor pointed to each of them in turn. "...and for me and Rimmer..." he pointed to himself and over his shoulder "...if I showed you!"

"Oh, do lead the way sir!" Kryten stepped forwards, eyes shimmering with an odd sort of admiration. The Doctor glanced Kryten up and down before swivelling on his heels and leading the crew back on to the bridge.

The control panel was more decimated that Lister had originally anticipated, several small fires had even broken out in various areas which none of the crew seemed particularly mindful of, both the blue and red alert bulbs were smashed and the pilots seat had been torn to shreds, thankfully without the Cat or himself in it. The Doctor wobbled slightly, prizing open the door to the box which was awkwardly angled through the window. He grunted, hoisting himself inside. There was a moments stillness before he reached out through the door and flapped his hand. Almost a little too eagerly, Kochanski stepped forward and took it, being hoisted in to the box alongside The Doctor.

"Oh my god!" They heard her stunned half-laughing voice echo from within. "It's absolutely massive! Dave, come on in." Another hand reached out which Lister reluctantly took, stepping in to the box. He blinked to ensure that his eyes weren't playing tricks on him. What seemed like no more than a tattered and slightly oddly decorated booth on the outside was a sprawling control room on the inside, at least as far as Lister could see, the multiple staircases leading up and down from the ships gently humming florescent blue core suggested that the structure was even larger than it first appeared. The slightly naïve décor was not dissimilar to facets of Red Dwarf itself, things that didn't belong on a control panel occupying the large hexagonal pillar at the middle of the room, such as a screen that swung out on a zigzagging retractable metal arm not unlike a tacky bathroom mirror, clearly marked stainless steal bath taps and large red buttons which looked as if they should have had "DO NOT PRESS" plastered across them in imposing white letters and even what looked like the nozzle of a gramophone. A single red stiletto hanging from one of the numerous metal pipes at the core caught Listers eye, making him wonder if The Doctor had a crew of his own. The hollowness that resonated throughout the structure between the bleeps and low howling of the resting engines told him that this was a man who travelled alone. The circuitry he saw beneath the grates supporting his feet was absolutely mind boggling and while Lister claimed in no way to be any sort of engineering aficionado, he'd seen the inner workings of more than a few ships in his life time, none even remotely like this one. It barely even seemed to make sense.

"Bigger on the inside and all variations thereof!" The Doctor announced before trotting around to the console screen. "I've heard it all. Feel free to take a seat, I just need to warm the old girl up, she's a bit frazzled from the crash."

"My god, I've never seen anything like it Mr Doctor sir!" Kryten exclaimed. "A-and I've seen some ships in my day, what ever do you run this on?"

"It has a heart." The Doctor winked, stroking the controls in front of him in a far too affectionate manner than publicly acceptable.

"This place is all kinds of funky!" The Cat said, overwhelmingly impressed.

"You should see the wardrobe." The Doctor commented slyly. The Cat's face lit up at this offer. The Doctor made a series of gestures to which Cat responded with a thrilled screech and then barrelled off down the stairs to the lower decks. There was silence for a moment as the crew of Red Dwarf stood awestruck until the echoic cry of "There's a library in the pool!" wafted up the stairs from down below. Proving to be the straw that broke the camels back, the group suddenly found themselves in fits of laughter at their strange predicament.

"Aaaah!" The Doctor cried with relief. "That's more like it! Now...!"

He gesture to the sofas.

"Sit yourselves down, lets chat, I'll put tea on, tea is cool. Well no, not ideally. But regardless! Tea time!"

The Doctor produced an antiquated brass kettle from beneath the control panel and placed it on what looked like a built in gas stove. Lister, Kochanski and Kryten sat in awestruck silence while the Doctor fiddled with the dials and switches until the kettle back to squeak. He then promptly poured them English tea in cracked china cups before perching himself on the side of the control panel, smiling down at them devilishly.

"So you're the crew of Red Dwarf but there are only four of you and Red Dwarf plus the rest of its crew, the population of a small city might I note, is nowhere to be seen! And you're three million years in to deep space! How does that happen? Anyway, somehow when I tried to reach you I found you, despite the fact you were out in a peripheral vessel. Quite a lovely one might I note, a bit of a fixer-upper but it does have a certain rusty charm to it..." He paused to sip his tea. "Mm, yes. The boys from the Dwarf. And one girl. My guess is that your ship was lost or stolen, yet some part of it remains on in Starbug despite this. Anyway, that isn't the important part! So here I am, minding my own business when I get a distress call from one Ace Rimmer, but I lose all sort of contact with him before he can really detail to me the nature of his situation, all I catch from him is that I need to find you. The crew. At least I think it was him, his nose sounded a bit blocked or something towards the end, perhaps there were two of them."

A knowing grin forged itself upon Listers lips when he thought of Rimmer switching between the two persona.

"I did attempt to lock on to him and transport him aboard the TARDIS but I lost signal so I set about finding you, crashed in to your ship and now here we are! It's almost as if some sort of force brought us together, as if the TARDIS brought us together of her own volition! God only knows what happening to poor Rimmer but apparently you're the ones he wants to get him out of his pickle." The Doctor downed the rest of his tea with a slight gasp of pain at the temperature. Lister spoke up.

"Red Dwarf, that is our ship which was indeed stolen, was subject to a radiation leak as a result of incorrectly repaired drive plates, courtesy of a total smeghead. I was in stasis at the time, I survived and my cat who was sealed away in the hold went on the create...well...The Cat. Holly woke me up three million years later when the radiation was gone, resurrected Rimmer as a hologram, we found Kryten, we found Chris. That's about it!"

"That's brilliant, I love it!" The Doctor spoke is a low urgent tone before perking up "Any ideas about Rimsy then? For once I'm stumped. Actually no I'm not but I like to be all inclusive. Dave!" He pointed at the still grinning Lister. "What can you tell us, Dave?"

"Show me the video. The transmission I mean." He pointed to the screen. The Doctor nodded with an eldritch and unwelcome silence, his smile waning slightly. He walked slowly to the screen, played with a couple of valves either side and watched the screen splutter in to life.

"'Ere we go!" Lister quickly joined him at the screen. Sure enough, there was Rimmer, looking the same as ever, although he seemed to have mastered Ace's mannerisms and cadence particularly well, so much that Lister was almost a little stunned to believe that it was his Arnold Rimmer. The Arnold Rimmer. Smeghead by royal appointment. The charisma fit him like a glove. The revelation cause a small swelling of ambivalence in Lister's stomach. The transmission was fairly nondescript given how early it had been severed and really he didn't know what he expected to make of it.

"I...I don't know." Lister stepped back and rejoined Kochanski and Kryten on the couch. "I don't know what I was expecting to see."

"His face perhaps?" Kryten enquired. Lister was about ready to write this off as ill-timed sarcasm but then it struck him, with all the breath-taking force of a train colliding with his vulnerable self stood on the tracks with his arms wide open. He just wanted to see his face. That was all. He'd barely even listened to the video. Lister hung his head. He couldn't describe how odd it was, his burning desire just to see Rimmer. The boundaries of his feelings were at a critical point, he could barely process the fusillade of emotions that riveted through him agonisingly like bitter sweet acid that rotted his nerves, his veins and his heart. He noticed the Doctor staring at him with empathetic solidarity, as if he were no stranger to such feelings.

"Sounds like she's ready to fly again" The Doctor chiselled in to the thick silence before diving to the TARDIS's core with a immediate elated buoyancy. The ship began to whistle and howl indescribably, the whole deck shuddering as the TARDIS freed itself from Starbugs confines and wheeled outwards in to space.

The crew were all kept perfectly happy on board the TARDIS for the next few hours or so, Kochanski enjoying a smooth cocktail in the library pool while indulging in a compendium of Austen novels, Kryten making it his duty to clean every spare room aboard like a chambermaid and the Cat still trying to pick which outfit he liked best from the endless wardrobe. Lister found himself alone in the main control room with the Doctor for quite a while, so he saw it fit to strike up a conversation, despite the fact he seemed very fascinated by steering in no particular direction.

"So..." Lister rested a cheek on his elbow and swung his legs up on to the couch. "...Are you human? A hard-light hologram?"

"Neither." The Doctor chirped bluntly. A second or so of silence ensued.

"Then what are you?"

"I mentioned earlier, Galifrey...That's where I come from, the people who lived there were known as time lords. I'm a time-lord."

"A time lord, eh? Sounds interesting..." Lister glanced at the infinite ceiling. "So what do you do then, just skoot around space in your galactic phone box doing as you please."

"Pretty much, yeah! Although I must ask that you don't refer to her as a phone box, it's a police box, please. They were all the rage in the 1960s and my chameleon circuit broke. I like her like this."

"You travel?"

"Oh boy do I travel! That's all I do really, don't have much of a home, it's all travel travel travel. I assume you and I aren't dissimilar, eh?"

"I suppose not. Say...the human race..." The Doctor turned to face him in curious perturbation. "...do you know if they're still here? I...is Earth still here?"

"Oh no." The Doctor shook his head. "No, Earth was gone a long time ago, I watched it happen actually, quite a fun ceremony."

"You what-?!" Lister sat bolt upright.

"Don't misunderstand me now Dave, it was uninhabited. They needed to move on, expand their empire."

"So there are still humans?"

"Well...technically speaking, yes. 'Course every man who discovers a planet with a female species on it suddenly thinks he's Captain Kirk, humans do have a long and colourful history in interbreeding with alien life forms. "Pure", although I don't relish using that term, human beings aren't really a thing anymore, not at this time. But the empire is booming, such culture and music and food, oh! Don't even get me started on the food. I'll take you some time"

"So...there are still people..." Lister slumped in to his chair with a chuckle of disbelief. "...They're still alive. But there are no...proper humans? Would that mean I'm still the last-?"

"Well, there's a certain lady that I used to know who rather proudly flaunted the title of last human being alive but she was full of rubbish. You are indeed the last human!"

"Smeg." Lister sighed. "Oh well, close enough, at least I know that humanity did alright for itself."

"It did absolutely splendid!"

There was a short burst of silence until the Doctor cried out, gesticulated wildly.

"Aaah! Ah! I've found Rimmer." Lister had never moved so quick in his life, appearing in flash next to the Doctor. What he was seeing on the screen meant absolutely nothing to him but he held his breath. The Doctor's face fell solemnly. "Oh dear..."

"What? What!?"

"He's trapped somewhere that it might be a little hard to reach him."

"Where?"

"A void between time. The space between spaces."

"What do you mean by that?"

"He's being held prisoner outside of time. Beyond the universe. A dimension I've never seen before."


	4. Chapter 4

"What the smeg do you mean 'outside of time'?" Lister questioned with anguish.

"I didn't think it was possible for anyone to be held there and still be able to contact the living, for all intents and purposes time should be absolutely shattering around us right now if my calculations don't deceive me! Although it is of course possible that Ace caught us just before he found himself there. I can't get any sort of visual, but I've pinpointed his location. Not that that does us any good, it's Schroedinger's location. Simultaneously existent and non-existent."

"A...are you saying that there's no way we can get him back?" Lister's voice cracked slightly.

"Ha, not with attitude there isn't!" The Doctor raised his eyebrows alarmingly cheerfully. Lister was finding himself becoming increasingly irritated at this man's complete lack of a sense of imperative.

"Now, seeing as the TARDIS operates entirely by using time, this old girl won't do us any good...Unless we can find some sort of rift, some kind of crack..."

"A rift in the space time continuum?"

"Something of the sort yes, and even then our chances of finding him seem somewhat doubtful, there...appears to be some sort of structure around him."

"Structure? Like there are actually people living there? Do people just rent out non-time share holiday homes there? 'Yes, I'll be off to outside time and space for the summer, darling'" Lister mocked bitterly.

"Well, I want to say that's incorrect but who can be sure, It appears that Rimmer isn't the only one there. My readings are a little...unreliable...but it appears that there are multiple life forms inhabiting this non dimension. They appear to be deliberately scrambling my scanners though, clearly they don't want to be found. How I'm even picking up something outside of time in the first place is a miracle."

"Might I make a suggestion, sirs?" Kryten had sudden appeared at the top of the stairs with a pile of neatly folded linen cradled in his arms that he set down and descended to join them at the TARDIS core. "Mr Rimmer planted something, something that would allow us to track him even outside of time. Something corporeal. He shouldn't register as a life form, on account of him being a hard-light hologram, yet he still appears as a living creature. That means he must have something that is allowing you to find him. Something that makes outside of time...well become time..."

"Time within no time..." The Doctor commented. "But how? How would on bring time outside of time, to make the voids existence even register? "

"It baffles me quite thoroughly sir. I'm not particularly well versed in time theory."

"I am, I knew time theory before I even knew how to spell my name with crayons and a few letters backwards and this is what scares me slightly..." The Doctor placed his hands together and thoughtfully rested his chin on his finger tips, staring contemplatively at the crackling screen. "I have encountered such a phenomenon before. Well, a similar one, not entirely the same, there seems to be an entirely separate void outside of time in this case but anyway. It was a ball of concentrated non-time that housed Daleks, enemies of mine, it weighed nothing, it had corporeal form but no palpable life force. My discovery of it was purely accidental and I was unable to tell by looking or any of my equipment that it could possibly house anything outside of an end to the known universe...It isn't impossible for him to be there, it's odd that we even know...If he's outside of time, if he really needed help, why did he call for you? Certainly, you're his closest friends, but he could have quite easily had me take you to him once I carried out a rescue mission. Unless the jump from time to no time was something that only you could accomplish."

"Why us though?" Lister slapped his own chest indignantly. "What good are we, all we have is a JMC ship that's 3 million years out of date and our home has gone walkabouts! What the smeg could we possibly contribute when you have a phone box shaped time machine!"

"Your ship may be a little closer than one might think..." The Doctor commented before turning on his heels to punch something in to an antiquated looking keyboard. "...I wanted to find Red Dwarf and yet the TARDIS brought me here, to Starbug...AH HA!" Kryten and Lister both jumped to attention at this exclamation. "Turns out that Red Dwarf is in fact...on board your ship!"

"H...how does that happen!" Kochanski suddenly emerged wearing a floaty red sun dress with, stringy wet hair and a towel draped around her neck. "Starbug is the size of a small precinct on Red Dwarf!"

"It's hiding at molecular level. In a sock basket." The Doctor furrowed his brow. "At least I think it's a sock basket, there appears to be several different fungi and cultures that I've never encountered before flourishing at the depths of it. Welp, looks like it's back to Starbug then, sorry, bit of jaunt this was!" The Doctor skirted around the control panel and threw a large lever which caused the ship to lurch vigorously, sending most of the crew reeling backwards in to the safety railings. With the same indescribable howl as when they'd taken off, the TARDIS came to a gentle halt. Wordlessly, The Doctor opened the door to reveal the box safely parked in the midsection, and ushered the Red Dwarf crew out of the door. He requested that they show him to the sleeping quarters, which they complied to hastily. Upon reaching the repellent sock basket stationed somewhere in the darkest recesses of Lister's quarters, the Doctor produced a strange, wand-like device from his pocket which he aimed at the basket and seemingly fired to no effect save for a whirring and a flash of green light. The socks suddenly dispersed, flecks of yellow dust shooting up in to the air and comprising themselves into a sphere which hovered parallel to the Doctor's forehead.

"Nanobots!" Kryten exclaimed. "My nanbots stole Red Dwarf! How on earth did that happen?"

"Quite simple, they rebelled against you and took it while you weren't looking, they needed the adventure. Hello!" The Doctor waved at the sphere. "I'm the Doctor."

The sphere let out a quiet but high pitched succession of squeaks similar like a small rodent. The Doctor nodded as if they had posed him a very deep question and then raised a finger. "I don't mean to be a bother but could you possibly return Red Dwarf to it's rightful owners?"

The sphere squeaked again.

"That's the spirit!" The Doctor gave the sphere a slight jab with his wand-like device, causing it to scatter. Kryten began to fidget anxiously.

"W-where are they?"

"They've gone to reconstruct Red Dwarf, it left all the bits that it didn't fancy on a planet somewhere, we may have to pursue them"

Another stint in the TARDIS brought them to a standstill in space where, despite the frantic protests of the Red Dwarf crew, The Doctor flung the door of the suspended TARDIS open to reveal to them Red Dwarf, humming silently in space before them. They took together in the doorway of the impossible box, the Doctor pendulating between staring and the ship and their shocked faces, clearly proud of his handiwork. Lister drew a hand across his sweaty forehead. It all seemed far to abrupt. Suddenly Red Dwarf was back in front of them at what wasn't a far cry from a wave of a magic wand. While the Doctor far too pleased with himself to entertain the bemusement of the boys and girls from the Dwarf, Lister could see the uncertainty in the eyes of his crewmates. Kochanski was furrowing her brow at the newly generated ship, as if she sensed something eldritch in it's presence, something uncanny and alien. He knew that Kryten felt it to, despite his firm adoption of his default confused wide-eyed wonder at the world around him.

"Let's set her down." He slammed the door.

With a loud whistle, The TARDIS rested comfortably in the main corridors of Red Dwarf which the Doctor and the Dwarfers had very much assumed would be uninhabited. A nonchalant glance that the Doctor paid the console screen as he began to saunter towards the door told them otherwise, that suddenly the ship was packed with life.

"Well that's peculiar..." The Doctor frowned and gestured the crew away from the door to join his side. "There are people onboard. Hang on a sec." The screen made a short buzzing noise and crackled before plunging into blackness. Suddenly, a disembodied head materialised at the screens center, a sleepy, vacant eyed blonde woman with a gaunt nose and deep carmine painted lips. The Doctor looked merely curious while the faces of the crew lit up with the simultaneous utterance of the name:

"Holly!"

"What's 'appnin dudes?" She spoke flatly, her monotonous voice almost tinged with the imitation of warmth.

"Hol!" Lister exclaimed, pressing his palms on the control panel. "How did you get here?"

"I dunno, nanobots didn't want me so they chucked me in 'ere." She rolled her eyes and bobbed her isolated head a little. "There's a new Holly in charge of the ship now."

"What do you mean "a new Holly?"" Kochanski stepped forwards.

"The crew are back and the nanobots didn't need a doddering old clod like me, even if I do have an IQ of 6000"

"So they stuck your files in to the TARDIS?!"

"Yeah, ain't half noisey in here, All of a sudden I can see all there is, all there was and all there will be. My 'eads killin' me."

"That's brilliant!" The Doctor shrieked, clapping his hands. "Your ships computer was rejected by the nanobots for the rebuilding of Red Dwarf so they chucked you in here! And now you're the TARDIS! That's...peculiar! I'm not used to you..." He gestured over his own visage. "Having a face."

"Gotta admit it's a pretty nice one though, eh?"

"It certainly is, sexy." The Doctor winked at the new face on his computer screen. Kochanski raised a scrutinous eyebrow at the Doctor, silently wondering if the crew should excuse themselves and let the two lovebirds be.

"Be careful out on the ship now, Doctor." Holly warned as he drew back from the panel.

"Oh, don't worry!"

The Doctor flung the door open, exposing the crew to insant wishes that they'd taken Holly's vague warning with the severity that it deserved. They were met by the imposing nozzles of JMC munitions in the shaking hands of the security guards who should have been three million years absent. Taking the first trepidacious step, the Doctor moved forwards with a precise caution, his hands up, the crew slowly following suit as they all formed a neat line outside of the TARDIS, which Lister was sure to kick shut with his boot to ensure that these anomolous gunweilding men didn't become curious as to it's contents. Although either way it must have looked positively strange to them, a group of four stepping out of a box so small that it would warrant their group hugging to all fit in together. The Cat's absense registered in Listers mind briefly, but he thought it best to leave the Cat in the TARDIS. If they could somehow engineer Holly to instigate a resuce mission from the brig that may possibly have awaited them, Cat would have been the ace up their collective sleeves. The Doctor opened his mouth slowly.

"Right. I can explain this."

"Can you now?" The guards moved aside as the thick figure of a heavily accented man made his presence apparent at the hostile welcoming party, bobbing to a halt and sticking his hands defiantly in his pockets. Lister and Kochanski exchanged puzzled panicked glances at the sudden presence of a man who by all accounts, died 3 million years ago. The security guards they were willing to write off as masquerading rogue simulants, but there was no mistaking the hefty frame and distinct American accent of one Captain Hollister.

"Captain Hollister!" Lister remarked boldly. "Wh-what are...?"

"What exactly do you call this?" The stout captain motioned lazily to the TARDIS parked behind them. He seemed to pay very little heed to Lister, cutting him off as if he hadn't heard him talk in the first place. "And who is this man?"

"The Doctor." The Doctor beamed.

"Doctor wh-"

"Just The Doctor."

"And precisely _how _did you get aboard this ship?"

"Well, there's a perfectly good answer for that, might take me a while though." The Doctor gulped, feeling the barrel of one of the guns being pressed egregiously in to jaw, a cold sweat forming on the back of his neck as a result.

"Take him to the brig." Captain Hollister glanced at the rest of them ponderously for a moment and simply turned on his way, the hands of the confused crew members dropping to their sides once removed from his vision. Lister puzzled momentarily before hurriedly ushering Kochanski and Kryten down the corridor, glancing back nervously at the Doctor who was being marched brig-ways by a procession of JMC gunmen but seemed assertively calm regardless. Another sect of security guards began to push the TARDIS slowly after him, heaving the small dimension with much straining.

"Kryten, what the smeg is going on?" Lister hissed.

"It would appear that in rebuilding Red Dwarf, the nano-bots reconstructed the entire crew also!"

"What?! That's absolutely mental!"

"That it is sir, but I find it odd that Captain Hollister paid us so little heed, especially considering that I'm also an unfamiliar crew member. He barely even seemed to notice us!"

Lister skidded to a halt as a pudgy faced man with a receeding strawberry blonde hairline and fish like protruding lips passed them in the corridor, carrying a suitcase in either hand. Lister felt almost a pang of hurt that one of his closest friends had barely noticed him.

"Peterson!" He cried. Peterson turned, as if he was uncertain about the voice that called him, squinted in to the distance and then returned to his commute without second heed to the unfamiliar crew members. Lister's shoulders fell with disheartenment.

"Wh...why don't they notice us?"

"Lister, have you always been wearing that necklace?" Kochanski leaned in and grasped a small grey device that resembled a 20th century earpiece strapped around Lister's neck. He looked down at her slender fingers inspecting this odd piece of jewellary that he had somehow aqquired.

"Y...you're wearing one too!" Lister noted. Kochanski pulled back to inspect her own newfound necklace.

"Oh! So I am." She grasped it and pulled it over her head. All of a sudden, heads of passing JMC employees turned as if she'd only just materialised in the corridor.

"Nice outfit." A passing man commented, scanning her red leather clad body up and down with a leer before continuing of his way. Kochanski looked around in confusion, glancing from her necklace to Lister and back.

"They notice me now!"

At that moment, a young woman blonde curly haired bridge bunny who Lister regonised as someone that Kochanski had been friendly with at one point came scooting around the corner, holding a pile of papers and clipboard, staring eagrly at her friend.

"Chris!" the young girl exclaimed. "Do you think you could file these for me? Kay thanks!" She forced the papers into Kochanskis hands before almost bowling Lister over to no reaction as she barrelled off to attend to her post. Kochanski hastily put the necklace back on before despositing the papers on the ground and joining Lister and Kryten in a brisk sprint back to Lister and Rimmer's quarters.

Stepping in to his room was surreal. The entire room was grey, cheap and plastic like a drab student room as it had been when he first moved on to Red Dwarf, before they'd renovated the ship in the interim years between the radiation leak and now. Everything was as he remembered it, his guitar propped up on the wall next to his spare boots, his locker plastered with posters of voluptuous women and filled will generic JMC brand beer and leftover curry, his black and neon bed sheets and plethora magazine tear-outs, posters for Zero-Gee football and photographs of relatives, pets, ex-girlfriends and employee parties, bright lights in his face and a clear plastic cup in one hand. And then there was Rimmer's bunk, every wall hanging arranged pedantically, his useless revision timetable, his newspaper clippings containing the name Arnold that pertained to him in no way at all, his swimming certificate and a mounted antique pistol. The JMC issue blanket was folded neatly as if Kryten himself has tended to it at the foot of the bunk next to his JMC emblem pajama set. The sight of it made Lister's heart pound for reasons that he couldn't quite fathom.

The three crew members jolted at the sound of a man entering the room behind them, all swiveling round to be met with the uniformed figure of Arnold J. Rimmer who paid them no heed before sliding in to his chair and flipping open a compendium on Napoleonic wars. Lister stood in a stunned silence at how the man he'd been driven to madness by barely noticed him. Remembering the occurances of the past few minutes, Lister tugged at the device around his neck, freeing himself from it. Only then did Rimmer swing around and met his eye.

"Oh! Listy! I didn't hear you come in!"


	5. Chapter 5

Lister lost recollection of exactly what happened after that utterance as all his emotions had pooled simultaneously into a large, intense maelstrom of pain, joy, heartbreak, anger and god knows what else. This maelstrom chose to manifest itself with anything but pleasantries as when he finally regained his senses, he found his own clenched fist splattered with little flecks of stark red blood, the rest of which was trickling from Rimmer's nose, the man now lying in a bewildering heap at his feet.

"Dave!" He heard Kochanski cry before removing Kryten's necklace and her own. She sprang towards him, taking a firm grip of his shoulders before he could prepare himself for a second punch, squeezing him lightly in an attempt to calm him down. Rimmer, tears brimming at the corner of his eyes, lay silently on the floor dabbing the blood from his nose while the rest of the room remained in blood curdling stillness.

"...Is that all you have to say to me...? After...all this?" Lister choked, lowering his slightly bloodied knuckles to his side, his back juddering under the strengthening threat of tears.

"All this? Lister, I only saw you a few minutes ago!" Rimmer sprung to his feet with a wearing a contorted anguish on his red flecked face. "What's gotten in to y-"

Rimmer could scarcely finish his sentence for he was shocked in to a mute state by Lister lurching forwards and throwing his arms around him, gripping his corporeal, non-hologramatic bunk mate as if he expected him to slip away again. He could hear his heart beating, a heart beat tainted not by the faint buzz of the buried light-bee.

"It's you. You're here...Why're you here? The Doctor said you were-"

"Lister, if I might be frank with you..." Rimmer struggled against Lister's tight grip, nervously smiling at Kochanski and Kryten "...you're making me more uncomfortable than Christmas dinner at my parents house. A-and who are these two!?" He managed to free himself from Lister's grasp. Lister was finally grinning again in his usual gormless, gerbil-like fashion that he'd been so inclined to disinherit for the past few months at Rimmer's presence, even if their re-union was confoundedly bitter-sweet.

"This is Kryten, don't you remember?"

"U-um, sir..." Kryten leant in and slapped Lister slightly on his shoulder to signal that he should come closer. "The Rimmer you're looking at now is a different Rimmer to the one who adventured with us, this Rimmer remembers nothing that happened after the radiation leak. He's a creation of the nanobots." Lister's mouth hung open a little.

"You sure?"

"Quite sure. In his mind, he was talking to you just before you were reprimanded for the possession of Frankenstein."

"You mean he doesn't remember anything?" A quick glance saw that this new Rimmer was becoming slightly impatient and confused. "Nothing at all, not even you?"

"No sir. This Rimmer and I have never met."

"Well come on then!" Rimmer gestured indignantly. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your ravishing lady friend and your mechanical companion with a head that looks like some weird speciality sex toy?"

"Kris Kochanski, Kryten, this is Arnold J. Rimmer. You already know that though." Lister presented the two to him. Rimmer cocked his head on one side.

"Hang on, that's not Kochanski. First, she's Scottish. Second, she doesn't look like that. Third, I saw her at the navigation panel a couple of minutes ago, no way she could have gotten here before me."

"Of course, alternate universe!" Kochanski exclaimed, slapping the side of her head. "There's another me here!"

"I know this isn't something you hear from me often, but the smeg is exactly going on right now completely escapes me." Rimmer said with a deadpan humour about him. Lister's head jolted suddenly.

"Oh smeg, The Doctor!"

* * *

The sickly white burning spotlight clunked in to being, flooding the Doctors vision, obscuring the faces of those who sat across the interrogation table from him. Aside from a light flinch as a result of the assault upon his unsuspecting retinas, he kept his cool demeanour and knowing smirk. He could see visible irritation beginning to etch away at the guards from his outwardly cocky attitude which let him know that the situation was seemingly in his favour. He found himself confronted by a tightly wound yet sturdy specimen of a man, deceptively thin frame and a seething barely concealed violent disposition simmering in his harsh gunmetal eyes. As if he had a distinct flair for the cinematic, The Doctors interrogator brushed his finger tips lightly along the tables edge as he fell gracefully into the seat opposite The Doctor, who still maintained his confident demeanour. He could tell that it disturbed and irritated the man who's name-tag he could now see read Ackerman. He was asked a series of series of mandatory questions regarding his age, his race, his sex and so on, and with each innocent recital of regulation information gathering, he could feel the achingly virulent tension in the man grow.

"So...Doctor..." The man said, with a poisonous affectation. "As it stands you are guilty of bringing an alien vessel aboard the ship, which is being examined as we speak, without a permit. You claim to be a "time lord". Such a high and mighty being is he who assigns himself the title of lord when he doesn't deserve it. And you say you have no reason to be here? You're just visiting? A tourist? You expect me to believe any of this nonsense that you're feeding me?"

"Not in the slightest, but it would move things along faster if you did" He grinned. At this, the tension finally broke, Ackerman bursting forth from his chair, slamming the table into the Doctor's stomach with the force as he exacted a forceful right jab to The Doctor's chiselled cheekbones. The Doctor's head lolled to one side, forced to discard the smile if only briefly while he expelled a little blood that pooled in his mouth. Captain Hollister was slumped beside the prison door, staring lazily at the goings on before him. The Doctor knew that Hollister should have been taking the moral high ground and attempting to prevent such attacks but he knew that his mistrust for him ran incredibly thick. The crew were all already incredibly wary of him, and needed very little excuse to throw him in the brig.

"Do not give me that sort of cheek if you wish yours to still be intact by the end of this session!" Ackerman screamed, flecks of spit spraying from his maniacally flapped jaw.

"Very well then..." The Doctor rubbed the aforementioned cheek slightly to alleviate the pain.

"You are guilty!" Ackerman continued to bark like a dog. "You'll be spending the rest of your time aboard this ship in the brig, until you reach Earth where you shall be court marshalled."

The process was swift and clinical, The Doctor finding his beloved tweed jacket and bow tie stripped of him and sequestered in a cardboard box marked with his prisoner number, his sonic screwdriver and various other trinkets resting atop the folded clothes. Forced into his lilac prison jumpsuit, he was marched by the nozzle of a JMC rifle jabbing the small of his back to a lift which lead him and his escorts to several small copper coloured prison cells, suspended by the lift shaft in the middle of a seemingly bottomless pillar of cells around the outside. The Doctor found himself fascinated by the ship's capacity to accommodate such disparaging yet sweeping structures in its underbelly. He was sure it would take him years to visit the entire ship, which almost saddened him slightly as he was thrust in to his cell, the door bolting behind him. Left with little to do, he slumped on to his bunk and stare wistfully at the ceiling.

* * *

"Holly! Holly!" Lister slapped the edges of the quarters main screen. "Holly!"

A balding man materialised in the blackness before him.

"David Lister." The man said with a heavy accent. "What can I do for you?"

"No, no, the other Holly! The old Holly! The non-resurrected Holly!"" Lister flapped his hands in frustration. "Female Holly! Space senile Holly!"

"There is no female Holly, anything else I can do for you David?"

"Don't call me David, Hol. There's a blue box on board this ship somewhere with another you in it, any possibility that you could contact it?"

"Well, it would be a breach of JMC regulations, as that particular box has been impounded. I'm inclined to report you to Captain Hollister for even posing such a suggestion."

Lister groaned, irritatingly aware of how far from the Holly he knew this resurrected program was. For one thing, this one seemed to have a remote sense of duty. Rimmer, Kochanski and Kryten were all sat pensively behind him, not contributing as of yet.

"Look Hol, The Doctor has been taken to the brig and we need him to...!" He turned to the new Rimmer, conflicted. "We need him to get Rimmer back!"

"I'm sitting right here!" Rimmer chimed, slapping a palm on the table.

"Not you!" Lister snapped. "The real Rimmer!"

"Am I not real to you? What the hell has gotten into you Listy!? You're acting like some kind of space-age Liverpudlian Sylvester Stallone, with all your imperative and determination and bravado and distinct lack of curry stains on your collar! Look at you, one minute you're trying in vain to get your pudgy fingers to strain out a few notes of _One Step Beyond_ on that infernal wooden racket-baton of yours while slurping prawn vindaloo through a bendy straw and now you're kitting up with rifles and getting ready to run through the St. Johns Wood mansion garden of a cat-stroking eye-patched super villain, packed within an inch of it's life with black-clad assassins, all of which are firing wildly at you but never hitting you because you're...just on such a mission! Impervious to bullets are you now!" Had his speech been delivered with any more intensity, Rimmer would be fuming at the ears. Lister's shoulders fell as he released as heavy sigh, pulling himself away from the screen.

"I'm sorry...I...don't...I just don't know what to do. I'm really confused. On one hand you're here...On the other hand, The Doctor says that you're...in the void."

"Oh to hell with this Doctor character you keep mentioning. He sounds like a prize goit. How can you trust anything this man says?"

"He showed me the distress call!"

"Mr Lister please!" Kryten cried in an attempt to calm him, to no avail.

"I saw it. I saw another Rimmer there and his face was smeared with blood and..." Lister ran a hand down his face, his breathing increasing in speed and adopting a tremor. "...He asked for our help, he could be out there, alone and in the void and we need to get him back. He's you!"

"I don't want a repeat of the last time there were two of me. That was awful." Rimmer grimaced. Lister stepped forwards menacingly, taking Rimmer by the collar.

"We. Have. To help him." He spat each word brutally. He noticed a visible gulp from Rimmer.

"I-if you insist. It all sounds a tad bit dangerous if you ask me." Lister released his collar and turned back to Holly again. Kochanski stood.

"Look, if we can just find a way to contact Holly in the TARDIS, she may be able to get a message to the Cat, who as I understand is still in there. If he could say...Fly the TARDIS into the Doctor's cell and then bring him here, it would all be peaches and gravy!" She said with a cheerful resolve. Rimmer glanced at her doubtfully.

"I don't like the sound of it one bit."

"Rimmer, please, I'm begging you." Lister moaned. Rimmer stood in nervous contemplation, arms defensively crossed and eyes flitting the room with uncertainty.

"Oh alright then." He scoffed. "But how are we going to go about getting this...erm...TARDIS...box thing you mentioned?"

"Ah!" Kryten suddenly spoke up. "I think I may have a solution, sirs! Lister, do you still own that wrist mounted computer?"

"Yeh, what of it?"

"Well, we had been able to transfer Holly to it at times when we needed her assistance remotely, perhaps we could find a way to extract her from the TARDIS and place her back inside the watch remotely."

"Brilliant idea Kryten!" Kochanski cried with glee. "I may be a navigation officer but that isn't to say that I don't know a thing or two about the ships inner matrix. Now, I can't really speak for the TARDIS as it's unlike any ship that I've ever seen before but running on the assumption that it runs in a similar fashion to Starbug or Red Dwarf even, we may be able to create a remote link between the TARDIS and the watch an extract Holly without a direct link-up." She snapped her fingers before clapping her two hands together in to a pistol like point. "Kryten, do you think there are any remaining nanobots to be had here?"

"I'm not sure, ma'am." He shook his head frantically. "They seem to have exhausted themselves rebuilding the ship, the remaining ones taking leave. They have disinherited me." He sobbed slightly. Kochanski nodded with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes, yes, tragic. But is there anywhere on the ship that we might be able to obtain more nanobots that we could code to transfer Holly from the TARDIS to here?"

"The medical bay!" Rimmer chipped in. "Trust me, a guy gets to know his way around the recovery room when he has a reputation for fainting and panic attack inducing cowardice. And exam spasms..." He trailed off before picking up. "I know that they keep them in there to service the scutters, although from what I've heard they're a bit primitive."

"It'll do!" Kochanski gave him a double thumbs up. "Come on!"

"Just a second ma'am!" Kryten called. "I think it's best we put these necklaces back on to avoid being noticed. The Doctor must have gifted us with them individually as we were unaware, I've been studying them while you were talking. This is a device known as a perception filter, technology first founded on Galifrey which will place the wearer in to a state where others will fail to notice them, their brain deliberately rejecting the notion of their presence for the perception filter makes them not wish to see them. Not dissimilar to Mr. Rimmer attempting to interact with women." Kryten chortled, although the resounding silence let him known that at this time it was uncalled for. "A-anyway, we only have enough of these for four of us, so Mr. Rimmer will be posted as watchman, in case anyone manages to see through the filter."

"Sounds good to me." Rimmer nodded

"Then let's go!" Kochanski fist pumped before dropping the necklace over her head and sprinting out the door, flanked by her fellow crew members.


	6. Chapter 6

Hence began their covert operation, although outwardly it held no delusions of covertness, four partially visible and one fully visible misfits hurtling through the corridors of a city-sized vessel to the lifts that would lead them to the medical deck. Truthfully, their plan lacked an semblance of subtlety or planning but they were very desperate. Nothing good could come of The Doctor being incarcerated in the brig too long considering his figure and demeanour against the brigs usual clientèle. The ship was dark now, as all but a few ghostly figures working night shifts had gone to sleep. The central medical bay was awash in a clinical aero blue light splattered with intrusive black shadows that bled menacingly over the contours of the medical cabinets and laid out equipment next to the surgery table. Kochanski gestured to the boys from the Dwarf behind her while guiding Rimmer to his watchman position as they crept in to the closed off bay. So far so good.

"R-rimmer?" Kochanski called as quietly as possible over her shoulder. "Where are the nanobots?"

"In green vials in the clear cabinet marked _Medicinal Nanotechnology_." He hissed. Kochanski looked around, the room suddenly seeming to increase in size.

"W...where is that?"

"Next to the embalming pod."

"We have one of those?" Lister scrunched his nose in disgust.

"Yes! Red Dwarf does have a morgue too, just in case!"

"Keep your eyes on the outside, Rimmer!" Kochanski instructed, at which Rimmer immediately snapped back to steadfast position.

Despite the surgical night lights, the medi-bay was still frighteningly hard to navigate, as the shadows seemed to over-stretch their boundaries and greedily consume what they could of the day, of their sight. Kochanski scrambled around in various cupboards, her fingers slapping against vials which she took, examined and dropped on the desk in succession. Kryten was having a little more joy as his eyes were able to switch to night vision, but the nanotechnology cupboard remained elusive. Lister let out a cry upon accidentally catching his finger on a surgical needle following mistakenly placing his hand onto the surgical tray.

"Shh!" Kochanski hissed. Lister looked at her, teeth sunk in to bottom lip and a hint of agony is his eyes, clutching his bleeding finger.

"That needle had better have been smegging sterile." He cursed. The haphazard searching continued, hands blindly sweeping counters and clacking against medical odds and ends that were hidden by the dark. Kochanski, squinting, finally located that nanotechnology cupboard, at which she gestured for her crew-mates to join her silently. She reached upwards and wrenched at the handles only to find, much to their collective chagrin, that the cupboard doors were steadfastly locked. The nanobots seemed so close, through the glass they stared teasingly with their faint harlequin glow. Kochanski let out a whimper of frustration, pounding her fist against the glass. Suddenly, Rimmer bolted in to the room and dived behind the surgical table.

"Warden Ackerman is here! Hide!"

"What would he be doing up here?"

"How should I know? Keep quiet!" With that warning, the crew all froze. Plastering themselves to the wall. Sure enough, the blood curdling stillness was disturbed only by the footsteps of Ackerman, imposing his threatening silhouette into the doorway of the medi-bay. Lister could hear Rimmer breathing heavily, which wasn't a good sign. If he knew the old Rimmer well enough, it was only a matter of time before he leapt up and turned himself in. Ackerman took one step forward and stopped. The entire crew daren't blink. Ackerman's eyes fell upon the surgical needle, and the single bead of blood hanging from it's tip. A foreign bead of blood that shouldn't have been there.

"Lights Holly." Ackerman announced. The medi-bay ignited. They were exposed. Rimmer closed his eyes and let of a silent sob of terror.

"Well well well..." Ackerman announced to seemingly no-one. Rimmer was biting his fist at this point. "You didn't think that perception filters made you completely invisible did you? Besides, I've seen so many, I'm a prison warden, people try and use them all the time." Ackerman strode forwards towards Kochanski who was pinned against the medi-bay wall and grasped at the device in her chest, ripping it from her neck at which she cried out in fear and shielded her face. Ackerman looked her up and down with a malevolent arousal.

"Hm, well...you're quite a catch." He growled lowly. Kochanski was only capable of a suppressed squeak at this point. "But straight to the brig with you, I'm afraid." Lister motioned to Rimmer. Rimmer shook his head. Lister began to wildly mouth to him _GO_. Rimmer continued to shake his head. Ackerman had already turned on Kryten, snapping the perception filter from around his neck too.

"My, you're a strange one."

He had still yet to notice the cowering Rimmer. All he need do was turn around. Lister mouthed once more: _GO._

_But what about the nanobots?_

_JUST GO._

Rimmer shot up, vaulted the medical table, sending surgical instruments flying everywhere and sprinting for the door, which turned Ackerman's full attention to him, causing him to pass Lister completely, the perception filter aiding the ignorance. Even if Ackerman has developed a heightened ability to see through perception filters, he was not completely impervious to them. As Ackerman launched a pursuit of the rapidly receding Rimmer, Lister took the opportunity to leap for the nanotechnology cabinet and drive his fist in to it, resulting in broken glass becoming embedded in his arm, which Kochanski let out another cry of horror at. Disregarding the pain, Lister grabbed the tube of nanobots in one hand and Kochanski's arm in the other before making a dash. While they managed to make short work of the medical deck and jam themselves into the lift, Rimmer was less fortunate, Ackerman catching up with him and pinning him to the ground.

"Arnold. Judas. Rimmer." The words rolled maliciously off his tongue as he straddled the incapacitated Rimmer, pinning an arm behind his back and causing him to cry out in pain. "I thought so, you weasel. Wouldn't take much for them to convince you to help them steal valuable assets from the central medical bay."

"W-we weren't stealing sir!" Rimmer cried, wincing.

"Oh really?" Ackerman pushed down on the pinned arm, threatening to snap it. "Then what, pray tell, where you doing in there after hours and wearing perception filters."

"Lister needed morphine. For his athletes hand! The dispensary was closed so we though we might be able to-"

"FILTHY LIES." Ackerman shrieked. "For one thing, there is no such thing as athletes hand. Another, the dispensary is open, I was just chatting to Nurse Costello who is doing a brilliant job of covering the night shift!"

"D-don't put me in the brig, please!" Rimmer begged. Ackerman smiled sadistically, tightening his grip on Rimmer's arm again, eliciting another rather loud cry of pain

"I do love it when they beg."

* * *

"The nanobots, quickly sir!" Kryten gestured to Lister who handed him the tube, Kochanski hovering like a bee to a flower around his bleeding arm, trying her best to tend to it with tissues from her pocket. Kryten took the tube and the watch, fiddled with a few dials on the top of the tube and opened it, extracting the contents with a needle that protruded from the tip of finger and inserting them in to the watch, which buzzing with a yellow light, now activated.

"Locate the program Holly aboard the TARDIS, requisitioned goods storage!" Kryten announced. The watch hummed and flickered for a few moments. Suddenly, Holly's vacant face blipped in to view. She blinked in confusion.

"Holly!" Kryten said.

"'Ello, what's going on?"

"We need your help, is the Cat still in the TARDIS?"

"Yes, yes he is. He found a bed and went to sleep somewhere, I locked the TARDIS door from the inside to prevent the JMC crew from entering it, they're going to incinerate it at 0800 hours tomorrow."

"Holly, we need your help!" Kochanski briefly left the side of the increasingly light-headed Lister.

"Smeg, so much blood..." He groaned. Kochanski flailed a little, letting out a subdued yet visceral scream of panic.

"Oh god, Kryten, what're we going to do with Dave?! He-he's..." She collected herself. "Holly! We need you to wake The Cat up and instruct him on how to move the TARDIS to the prison cell so we can collect the Doctor! Bring the TARDIS up to Lister and Rimmer's quarters!"

"Are you sure that's a wise idea? Knowing him, he'll probably end up crashing me in Ancient Greece!"

"I know it's a long shot Holly, but you have to! It's our only chance!" Kochanski pleaded.

"Alright, but don't blame me if he breaks a whole in the fabric of space time, you gave the orders, don't say I didn't warn you." The watch flickered a second time as Holly disappeared. Kochanski quickly turned her attention back to Lister, who was on the verge of passing out, blood pooling on the airline seat beneath him.

"The nanobots!" she cried to Kryten, who was equally as flustered. "Can we use them to repair Dave's arm?"

"I'm afraid not ma'am, they've all returned to the TARDIS with Holly!"

"Drat!" Kochanski slammed her fist on the adjacent wall, breathing heavily. "W-we'll get you in bandages once we reach the quarters, don't worry, i-it's just the shock!"

The three exited the lift, the barely conscious Lister hanging between Kochanski and Kryten, doing their best to drag his limp form down the corridor in spite of the strange, worried looks they were getting from the night-shift employees. It turned out that they barely had time to even get back to the quarters, before the unmistakable whistling indicated the turbulent landing of the TARDIS, accompanied this time by an ominous flashing storm of yellow, blue and white thunder. Before anyone could warn the unsuspecting to move, the TARDIS materialized violently in the corridor, crashing through the roof and taking out the doors to many of the dormitory rooms, JMC employees diving desperately for cover. The box skidded down the corridor with an awe-inspiring display of sparks at the sheer friction before catching on a ceiling beam which it ripped from its confines, destroying a large portion of the upper deck. It wobbled a little further, it's momentum hindered, before falling over impotently, like someone had knocked over a domino, in to a pile of rubble at Kryten, Kochanski and the now fully unconscious Lister's feet. The TARDIS itself barely seemed to have chipped paint, while the corridor it had impacted was less lucky. Confused bystanders were leaping from their bunks to inspect the absence of their doors, corridor walkers were picking themselves up and tending to injured friends. The TARDIS smoked a little before the door burst open, the Cat clambering up shakily, hair displaced, wet and dripping down his glittering purple cravat, face plastered with a slightly embarrassed grin.

"H-help me, I'm slipping!" Kryten grabbed his hand, pulling him from the box, before inspecting the long drop in to the TARDIS himself.

"What on earth did you think you were doing!?" Kryten scolded. "You've destroyed half of this deck with your absolute recklessness!"

"The deck? What about my suit?! It's all covered in debris and pool water! Face it, the Captain will want to lock you up for damaging such a priceless work of art rather than his decks! Anyway, help me get this thing upright, eraser head!"

Kryten and the Cat clambered over the rubble and heaved the TARDIS upright with something of a struggle. Kochanski and Lister quickly followed them in, slamming the doors behind them as to make sure that the JMC onlookers didn't get too close a look at it's contents. Not that it was much good, as they heard indignant knocking immediately after performing this act.

"Oh thank 'eavens!" Holly sighed upon seeing the rest of the crew. "Damn near killed me, this one did! One of you take the helm!"

"I'm amazed he even managed it!" Kochanski quickly dived for the alien console, as the only one with any sort of navigational experience. She scanned the controls with utter perplexity before announcing: "This is supposed to have six pilots, no wonder Cat crashed it!" With bold conviction, Kochanski began to work switches which she recognised and improvise those she didn't, scooting around the panels and throwing switches as she believed they should be thrown. Sure enough, the TARDIS began to whistle and shake, indicating take off, at which she smiled, open mouthed with amazement at her own skill. Meanwhile, the Cat ran back to the infinite wardrobe to try and find himself a change of clothes while Kryten lay Lister's limp body on one of the seats.

"I cleaned the first-aid area here earlier, I'll find something to dress his wounds."

"See that you do!"

Kochanski puzzle briefly on how to get the TARDIS to the brig now that she had actually got it into orbit, but seeing as she knew she wouldn't have to travel outside of their current dimension and time, she tentatively entered the latitudinal co-ordinates on the screen as best she could remember them. A panel sparked, eliciting a small squeak from her before she dashed to attend the the problem, again throwing the switches that she had thrown during take-off. However, instead of grinding to a gentle halt, the TARDIS swerved violently to one side before colliding with some external force, sending its passengers hurtling in all directions. They had indeed materialised in the brig, but shakily. The TARDIS hovered around the suspended prison cells where the Doctor was being held, before hurling itself into them again, removing a large chunk of the walls. The Doctor, who had been pining away in his cell for some time, leapt back at the sudden absence of his cell's right wall, scraping his hands through his hair in exasperation at the drunkenly hovering TARDIS before him.

"Oh no no! What are you doing?!" He cried. "No no no, she isn't meant to be driven like this! You're doing it all wrong!"

The TARDIS swerved towards him again, necessitating the Doctor to leap behind his bunk to avoid being crushed as it flopped in to his cell like a sack of potatoes. The door burst open once more, this time a wild haired Kochanski emerging.

"Oh gosh, it worked, get in Doctor! We're off to save Ace!"


	7. Chapter 7

"He-hey! My boys and girls from the Dwarf! Or should we call ourselves the boys and girls from the TARDIS now!" The Doctor bounded in to the TARDIS like an excitable Golden Retriever, palms flat to garner high fives from his new crew members which he accomplished. The flat palms then clasped together as the gears of his mind began working towards a plan, strolling briskly around the console.

"Right, let's get out of here before they notice the hole, oh my, Dave is unconscious, how did that happen? Anyway-!" He began to manipulate the controls flippantly, when suddenly Kochanski stepped up to his side, smiling playfully, a mischievously curved brow forming balcony above her wide walnut eyes. She placed one hand on the TARDIS core delicately, tracing her fingers along the edge.

"I am a navigation officer, and this vessel clearly needs more than one driver."

"Yes, but you're a terrible driver if I do say so myself."

"Oh nonsense Doctor, I picked up enough to take it here on my own, perhaps a little roughly but I managed. You could use a co-pilot!"

"If you insist." The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Make yourself useful and man that panel there." He gestured to the other side of the core. Kochanski grinned, jumping with eagerness to captain under the Doctor's command as she slid around to her assigned station.

"Oh, there is one slight problem though..." She bit her lip.

"Mm?"

"We might have lost Rimmer, the new Ri—long story, but Warden Ackerman chased him off somewhere and we lost him."

"Ah yes, the nanobots resurrected Rimmer." The Doctor hypothesised absent-mindedly, as if reading aloud a shopping list. "Don't worry, I should be able to fix that."

Thankfully, Rimmer's unblemished and notorious track record for being an abject coward had served in his favour for once in his life. When Ackerman had marched him to Captain Hollister, snivelling with fear and spouting increasingly nonsensical explanations for his presence in the medi-bay after hours, the jury had refused to believe that someone of such cowardice would even have the capacity to challenge authority in such a way. Lack of the other members invalidated Ackerman's attempts to convict him on counts of being an accessory to theft, and Rimmer had simply been detained in the minimum security holding cell on the upper decks for lack of anything better to with him and at the utter behest of Ackerman. So there he sat, hands clasped in his lap and shoulders still quivering from overwhelming fear. Ackerman was standing outside the cell, convinced of his guilt, keeping a very keen eye on him. Occasionally Rimmer would hazard a glance at his guard but never quite made eye contact.

After a few hours of sitting stone still on the cell bench, Rimmer noticed Ackerman turn his head in confusion, as if someone had tapped his shoulder and then disappeared. Rimmer could almost have sworn that he felt a slight breeze, which was nigh impossible given that they were in fact in space, unless the air conditioning was acting up again. Suddenly, with a loud whistle and a symphony of blinding lights, the TARDIS materialised just outside the cell, startling Rimmer in to hurling himself to the floor and clasping his hands above his head defensively. The door swung open zealously, as the Doctor stepped out in to the cell block, lilac prison jumpsuit discarded and sonic screwdriver brandished triumphantly.

"Arnold Rimmer!" He cried, as if he'd just seen an old friend. "I'm the Doctor, I've come to get you out of here, excuse me." He pushed Ackerman nonchalantly to one side, much to the latters mortification, and pressed the sonic screwdriver to the number pad, causing it to spark and the imprisoning force field to flicker in to non-existence. Without any hesitation, Rimmer leaped up, the Doctor ushering him in to the TARDIS and slamming the door behind him. The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief.

"This hasn't half been a hassle, getting off this ship! First mate Kochanski!" He pointed to her, stood proudly at the panel.

"Yes Captain?"

"Fire her up, let's blow this popsicle stand!"

"Aye aye!" Kochanski suppressed a giggle of excitement at feeling like an outlaw, reaching for a large lever which she pulled forwards. Rimmer stood open mouthed in shock at the door, barely even being able to form a coherent sentence to describe the interior of the TARDIS, all variations on "It's bigger on the inside" dying in his mouth. He noticed the unconscious Lister lying on the few seats and out of some strange sense of attachment, sat down beside him for lack of knowing how to respond to what was going on around him. They could hear Ackerman pounding on the door outside, but the Doctor and Kochanski began to fire up the TARDIS nonetheless. The box began to shudder, before letting out its signature hollow whistle and slamming in to movement with ground breaking force. The TARDIS was now orbiting, spiralling through space in a quest to find Ace Rimmer. The Doctor and Kochanski excitedly circumvolved around the console in opposing directions, manoeuvring around each other, The Doctor instructing her on combinations to memorise, buttons not to press, familiarizing her thoroughly with the interface as they travelled further away from Red Dwarf. All seemed to be sailing smoothly until Holly revealed herself on the screen once more.

"Red alert! You might want to see this!" She announced in a sing song voice. The display changed to security footage from inside Red Dwarf, alarms sounding and soldiers piling in to Starbugs and White Midgets in droves, hurtling out of the ship in pursuit of the blue box. The announcement ominously bellowed: _PRISONERS HAVE ESCAPED THE BRIG. ALL AVAILABE SOLDIERS MUST BE DEPLOYED TO RETURN CONVICTS IMMEDIATELY._

"Oh smeg, we're being followed!" The Doctor bit his lip. "They're quite close behind too, I may have to open a wormhole, the void as a space that operates outside of time should be accessible regardless of where or when we are, should we find a way so I don't think that would make much difference."

"But sir, there's an entire fleet of ships behind you!" Kryten, who had single-mindedly been attending to Lister up to this point, panicked. "Opening a wormhole could risk bringing the soldiers with you, especially at such close range!"

"That's a risk that I'm willing to take." Without further a word, The Doctor threw the largest of the switches on the console, causing the crew to all have to very quickly have to find something to hold on to before they found themselves plastered to the wall by sheer force. Rimmer, for lack of anything to hold, snatched up Lister's unconscious body and clutched it to his chest tightly, partly in the interest of his own safety but partly because to preserve Lister, who would have most certainly been more injured had he not taken hold of him. After a few minutes of turbulent riding, the TARDIS slowly drifted into a gentler pace.

"We've arrived!" The Doctor said. "Looks like the same time plane, but New Earth! Damn fine place to be! We can take a look around if we have a few hours to spare!"

"Don't celebrate yet, the White Midgets are still hot on your trail." Holly reminded.

"True, true, but we can make this work, let's set her down to land somewhere and hide out for an hour until the heat is off."

"Superlative suggestion, captain!" Kochanski applauded as she autonomously moved to set the TARDIS down with little instruction required.

The TARDIS found a cosy resting place in a large patch of bushes in the British countryside, far from any densely packed residential areas. It was perfectly hidden in the dark of the night, inviting only the curiosity of birds wishing to roost. The pursuing Red Dwarf fleet continued to circle the planet with a stern guardianship over all their movements, unable to track them but unable to leave should they attempt to slip away quietly unnoticed. Also, the revelation of a New Earth was something worth intensely documenting and returning to Captain Hollister. Aside from the need to shake their pursuers, the boys and girls from the Dwarf and/or TARDIS were thoroughly exhausted by their day. While the Doctor seemed to have no limit to his energy, still skipping around and conversing with Holly in to the wee small hours of the night, the more human of the group had to let themselves retire for a few hours, to allow the events of the day to fully take hold. The Doctor had given Lister and Rimmer a previously occupied bunk room that he claimed belonged to two very good friends of his, but refused to elaborate any further. Kochanski and Kryten had been given bunks together too, while the Cat had been left to his own devices in the wardrobe. Lister and Rimmer were more than used to bunking together, although Lister, having finally awoken from his fainting spell, was a little tentative with this incarnation of Rimmer, constantly having to remind himself that this Rimmer was alive, well and had no knowledge of the past five years of their friendship, of himself. Still, he didn't believe that he couldn't confide in him a little, after all, it was still the Rimmer that he'd joined the JMC with, the Rimmer he'd bunked with all the way up to the radiation leak. He knew that Rimmer well, but he'd known the other Rimmer longer. It was a simple matter of adjusting. A matter of realising that they were almost two seperate people. The two lay there in the bunks that the Doctor had given them, Lister on one side, head propped up by his hand on the top bunk while Rimmer lay beneath like a plank, hands clasped on his chest as he gazed contemplatively up at the underside of the top bunk.

"Rimmer...? Are you awake?" Lister whispered.

"Yes."

"Oh good." Lister returned to his normal volume. "I wanted to apologise for earlier. About how I acted, it wasn't right man. Like a space-age Stallone."

"I'm indifferent really, Listy." Rimmer spat. "Either way you're still a nice big cup of steaming smeghead tea, just with a different herbal infusion."

Lister laughed. "Ha, I missed that."

"Missed what?"

"Just those things that you'd say, weird analogies like that." Rimmer didn't reply, rolling his eyes and reaching for a copy of a the Space Corps Directive Manual to busy himself. Lister paused for a second before swinging his legs around and jumping from the top bunk, perching himself on the side of Rimmer's bed. Rimmer groaned with irritation and slammed the book down.

"What do you want this time?"

"Nothing man, I just wanted to talk to you."

"You can talk to me up there, why are you acting so strange?" Rimmer sat bolt upright, bringing himself face to face with Lister.

"Look, I know this might be hard for you to understand but I haven't seen you in a while from my perspective. Even if you are an utter gimboid, it just feels like the old days having you back around! It's just a sense of familiarity, y'know, i-it's nice." Rimmer stared in to space, before scrunching his face.

"Are you implying you're enjoying my company?"

"Ha, no." Lister laughed abruptly.

"It sounds like you are."

"Maybe a bit..." Lister admittedly quietly. "It's just nice." Rimmer almost managed a sincere smile but quickly suppressed it.

"Well, this is all very exciting, travelling with that mad man to get me back from wherever I've gone. Kochanski seems quite taken with that goit with a bow-tie who acts like some weird sort of senile toddler, just because he knows how to navigate an inter-dimensional phone booth. She's one step away from polishing every single switch after he touches it and keeping the hanker chiefs in her special scrap book." Rimmer narrowed his eyes with a smug grin. "Bet you're not happy about that, are you Listy? Your conquest ruined by that gangly teenager?"

"You know, if I'm perfectly honest with you, I'm not all that bothered." Lister shrugged. "They make a good team, they both know about navigating things...I can barely look after myself and be damned if she'll ever let herself look after me, she deserves someone like him. Someone eccentric and smart who doesn't find their mind wandering to a slow and painful untimely death at the mention of Jane Austen or Tosca or whatever it is that she likes. Bet you he's never slopped a vindaloo on that tweed jacket. I bet he has working taste buds. I bet he could play a real instrument, not just burp in a vaguely musical fashion...I bet he drinks wine."

Rimmer looked genuinely surprised by this response.

"Listy, are you feeling alright? Ever since we first met, your goal had been to get Kochanski, you got her, then you lost her, then your goal was to get her back! Nothing else!" Lister silently turned to face Rimmer, locking their eyes in a fixated stare. Rimmer edged back a little, feeling uncomfortable being held in such a way for so long. Lister in response edged closer.

"Rimmer."

"Y...yes?" Rimmer gulped.

"I've missed you, man. I...you're going to hate me for this..."

"Because I was ever so fond of you before."

Much to Rimmer's limitless horror, Lister placed on hand firmly on the back of his head and pulled him in a kiss, at which Rimmer froze completely, slowly acknowledging the mouth enveloping his before impacting Lister's shoulders with his palms brutally, creating a rocky distance between them with a face contorted in to pure mortification. He drew a palm across his mouth to try and banish the taste, doubtlessly resembling a mixture of curry and cigarettes. Lister cast his eyes downwards in a pre-empted shame, knowing that he'd blundering in to the situation fully aware of the consequences. Rimmer exhaled heavily.

"Oh, now it all makes sense." His disgust began to warp in to a sadistic satisfaction, simultaneously warping Lister's shame into a confused hurt. "Noooow it all makes sense. You've been a complete and utter fairy this whole time, the only reason you were so unremittingly irritating towards me ever since we first met is that secretly you've always wanted me. And the embarrassment just killed you didn't it? You couldn't take it, couldn't bare having to admit it in front of Peterson and all your other equally smeggy friends, oh no, you'd never live it down. Listy is secretly a stocking wearing nancy-boy. Oh ho, this is too much, I've hit the jackpot."

Lister stared at the cruel mocking grin Rimmer wore all too fittingly, feeling his chest begin to cave under agonising stress that gripped his heart, that Rimmer could possibly stoop so low.

"If you want me to keep quiet about this when the Dwarf fleet finally catch up with us, it'll cost you. Otherwise I'll let the whole ship know that you're in love with me. Wouldn't that just be terrible, Listy? Wouldn't it?" Lister stood, teeth buried in his bottom lip and hands curling into fists.

"You're a complete and utter bastard, you know that?" His voice was hoarse, bordering on a whisper.

"Were you and the other me sexually tilted in favour of each-other? I bet you were. Ho ho, now I see why you're so eager to get him back."

"Shut up."

"Everything about you makes so much sense now."

"Just shut up."

"I thought I was self loathing." At this final taunt, Lister found him emotions unbridled. He could feel his nails digging in to his palm, the dampness of the miniature pools of blood that formed as a result, the burning desire to punch Rimmer in the face once more raging within him. He ultimately let these feelings ebb, unclenching his fist with four neat crescents of blood decorating his palm. He shook his head silently.

"You're absolutely pathetic." Without waiting for a response, Lister stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.


	8. Chapter 8

Lister stormed down the stairs and in to the main control room of the parked TARDIS, where he found The Doctor and Kochanski laughing hysterically at a conversation that he hadn't been privy to. Or perhaps they'd been playing The Magic Flute, Lister knew how much Kochanski fell about when "her Dave" sung the German translation or whatever it was. The Doctor seemed like an eternally worldly fellow despite the fact he couldn't possibly have been older than 30. Lister knew that he was at his lowest of lows if he was finding himself getting jealous over Kochanski again. She looked up in the antebellum of her laughter at Lister, her face straightening when she saw his expression.

"Dave!" she said. "The Doctor was just telling me about when he met Jane Austen! Can you believe it? _Actually_ met her!"

"She was an absolutely sweetie." The Doctor commented fondly. "So witty too, I drop back for tea at her gazebo every now and again too!" Kochanski turned to him, placing both hands on his arm.

"Could we visit her together?" she gasped.

"Absolutely! I'd take you there now if we weren't on a mission and supposed to be remaining incognito!"

Lister was in no mood to see the two of them flirting. With a roll of his head and silent groan, he continued on his way down the stairs towards the lower decks of the TARDIS. Kochanski's gaze followed him until he disappeared. She turned to the Doctor, smiled politely and excused herself to follow him. She ran down the stairs but found that Lister moved a little faster than she'd expected. After navigating her way around a giant marble hall next door to the library/pool, she finally found him moping on a bookshelf floating somewhere on the pools upper tier, a soggy copy of _Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?_ in his hands which he was half heartedly thumbing through. Concerned, she waded through the shallow pool and climbed on to the bookcase beside him, sitting crossed legged and leaning forwards to examine his downtrodden countenance. She reached out a playfully poked his cheek, which caused a very weak smile.

"What's wrong, Dave?"

"Rimmer."

"Aren't you happy having him back?"

"It's not him though. It's another Rimmer."

"I don't see why that should make any difference, he's the same Rimmer you joined the Space Corps with, the same one you bunked with up until the crew was wiped out, he-"

"But five years is a long time." Lister cut her off. "Five years really changes a person, me and Rimmer, that is the previous Rimmer, we'd really gotten to know each other and I mean really...gotten to know each other. You do sort of start feeling closer to someone when they've attacked you with hex vision in a gingham dress. And when you've quite literally rescued them from their own psyche. He even saved our lives at one point!"

"Well...You can get to know the new Rimmer can't you?"

"Doubt that I even want to, he's more of a smeghead than I could ever have believed."

"Why is that?" Kochanski cocked her head to one side. Lister looked at her longingly, dying to spill everything to her, but in the end opened his mouth and let it impotently fall closed, his explanation dying slowly and receding back to his heart where it swelled and pained him further. Silently acknowledging his pain, Kochanski grinned and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. Before she could offer him any more comfort, the Doctor came barrelling down the stairs and in to the swimming pool in utter panic, screw driver in one hand and other running through his tousled hair in agitation. He flailed a little first to the confused stares of his shipmates before finally constructing a coherent sentence.

"Umm...Dave! You know how I said that humanity was doing pretty okay for themselves? This may not be exactly what you want to hear at the moment but they may be a little bit deader than they were before. Like a little bit a lot deader." Lister stood.

"What." He said flatly.

"I don't know how it happened, but they've destroyed everything. The Daleks. Everyone on New Earth has been wiped out."

"WHAT?!" Lister repeated, leaping from the bookshelf and in to the pool to face the Doctor. "What the smeg is a Dalek."

"Umm..." The Doctor simply gestured and scurried off back up the stairs, indicating that Kochanski and Lister should follow.

The Doctor flung the door of the TARDIS, now floating a safe distance above London open and allowed the two to witness the mayhem. They were just low down enough to see that not a single organic life form walked the decimated streets, instead covered in small robotic pods not dissimilar in shape to bullets, roaming around, barking out strange commands to one another in their ghastly metallic shriek of a voice. Lister needed no telling that these were Daleks. London had been brought thoroughly to it's knees, covered in a thick blanket of snow that lined the sides of the burned out husks of building that had once been, now barely stable blackened structures that crumbled around Earth's new inhabitants and around newly erected buildings, bronze in colour and sporting strangle spherical contusions, mimicking those who were building them. What had once been a landmark collection of neon signs that surrounded a plaza known as Piccadilly Circus now more resembled a snowy crater, the fountain that had once centred it in pieces, and the vibrant neon signs sparking in a heap at the foot of the buildings that they had previously adorned, now in the process of being transformed in to a large copper coloured hub, stripped with pulsating cyan lights, a cold, bureaucratic structure. Rivers had iced or been deliberately paved over, parks had been stripped bare, trees devoid of greenery clawing through the earth like burned skeletal hands. On closer inspection, Lister realised something irrevocably harrowing about the white powder that covered the ground and was whipped around in the frosty turbulence created by the TARDIS. It wasn't snow, it was human ash. Kochanski let out a sob, turning her head away and burying it in the Doctors coat and comforting embrace that he was more than happy to offer. Lister noticed the utter despair in the Doctor's eyes, displaying his own affinity for humanity despite his origins. Their breath lingered in the crisp, cold London air, mingling with the storm of bone-white ash. Lister placed a hand over his own mouth, tears streaming uncontrollably down his face. He looked at the Doctor, cradling the weeping Kochanski, who looked back at him, the usual vigour and optimism in his eyes completely dead. He saw it then, if only briefly, that The Doctor had seen more than he could possibly imagine. An entire universe of hurt and death flashed in his eyes then, just as the cold light of day caught them in an instant when he turned his head away from Lister to stroke Kochanski's hair. Unable to bare the sight anymore, Lister turned his back and silently begged the Doctor to close the door, which he did more than happily.

"I'm so sorry Dave." The Doctor whispered.

"They're all gone then?"

"All of them?"

"What about the ones off planet, the ones who...who colonised other parts of the galaxy, on other planets, w-what about them?"

"I don't hold much hope for them I'm afraid. Daleks are creatures who function solely on an all consuming hate for everything that is not Dalek, they feel no compassion, they have no humanity or sympathy, they only know how to loath, they see killing as glorious and purposeful. There is only one race they despise more than humans and that is time lords. And there's only one of those left, so that's an overwhelming amount of hate for one person." Lister turned and stared.

"You're...?"

The Doctor hung his head silently, softly whispering in to Kochanski's ear. A strange solidarity that Lister had felt burning within him for the Doctor suddenly ignited when he realised that they were more similar than he ever could have imagined. Only the Doctor and he could possibly know the all-consuming pain and uncertainty of being the last of their kind alive. As if he were waiting for the worst moment possible, Rimmer descended the stairs and joined the three, slapping Lister mockingly on the back with an insufferably smug grin.

"Well, this is pleasant, don't get too lively, you might break something with all your excitement over here! You'd think somebody died." Rimmer sung sarcastically, earning him only a poisonously enraged glare from both Lister and Kochanski. He smiled, ignorant of their condition. "Oh lighten up a bit!"

"Everyone's dead, Rimmer." Holly commented with the benefit of emotional detachment, seeing that neither Kochanski, Lister and The Doctor were in no fit state to do so. Rimmer glanced at the floor for a moment before adopting a look of confusion.

"What, everybody?"

"Everyone's dead."

"What, even-"

"Look for yourself." Holly interrupted, less than willing to go through the same exchange again, using her authority over the TARDIS to open the doors. Rimmer flinched a little before going to inspect the damage. He recoiled, shutting the door behind him, his face suddenly solemn and pale.

"Well, that's something..." He uttered quietly, his voice cracking with slight nausea. The Doctor finally released Kochanski, shaking his head.

"I don't know how this could have happened, it doesn't make sense, I...I was there before I came to find you, I don't know how this could have happened so quickly..." He paused for a moment, his face suddenly bursting in to life with epiphany. "Ace!"

Lister looked up "Ace?"

"There were other life forms in the void with him, Daleks! They were the ones who took him! Ace was a person that the world needed, someone like me, someone who had to be there to stop things like this from happening. That's what time lords used to do, they'd fix moments in time that weren't supposed to happen, they'd save entire races, they'd— That's why Ace needed to continue, without him, life wouldn't go on. Ace is almost time lord in that respect, in that he passes his knowledge, his torch, to other versions of himself. I wasn't there to stop it, Ace wasn't there to stop it...And the Daleks destroyed everything. If we rescued Ace from the void, we might be able to stop this carnage! Save the human race!" The Doctor wrung his hands with excitement.

"But sir!" Kryten appeared. "Isn't it ill advised to mix with a fixed point in time?"

"Perhaps, but the Daleks have unwittingly given us a mechanism to stop them. By removing Ace from time all together, they themselves have messed with an event that was supposed to take place, the Dalek eradication of the human race wasn't supposed to happen, not with Ace here, they've created a tangent time line deviating from the one where Ace exists. If we find Ace and re-introduce him, we can close the tangent time line and with any luck humanity should be able to continue as planned."

"So this is a tangent history?" Lister asked. "If Ace were still here, then would events have played out differently?"

"Yes." Holly interjected. "According to my analysis of the altered factors, the normal progression of time necessitated that you found the nanobots of your own accord while trying to reconstruct Lister's missing arm after his contracting of a virus that you discovered on a frozen vessel, and you were then arrested by the resurrected crew of Red Dwarf for destroying Starbug upon crashing it in the loading bay. Following a series of events during your trial, you were all thrown in the brig together, including the resurrected Rimmer."

"And that never happened, because they removed Ace from time?"

"Precisely. His removal created this tangent time line. If you find him, the universe will be corrected."

"What happens to this time line then?" Kochanski asked, wiping tears from her eyes. "Won't we remember it? Will everything suddenly be put to right and we'll just continue about the normal time line as if nothing happened?"

"Not necessarily." Holly shook her head. "The minute you reintroduce Ace, this time line will be destroyed and effectively will kill all of you, erasing you from the main time line completely."

"So there's no way out of this, to save humanity we must all die?" Lister shouted, frustrated at Holly's indifference.

"Perhaps. Unless you can find a way to get back to the main time line before this one closes Don't ask me." The Doctor stepped forwards, placing his hands on the console edge and bringing himself face to face with Holly, his face stone cold with a calculating seriousness.

"There may be a way." The Doctor said, his back to the crew. Rimmer was already shrinking in to a corner at the prospect of becoming part of an involuntary heroic sacrifice.

"I doubt it. You're in a doomed time. Unless you want to continue living this way."

"But the Daleks have destroyed humanity, there's no saying what will happen next, all of life in the universe could be exterminated by them now."

"I have a suggestion." The comparatively calm mechanoid Kryten stepped forward. "The Holly Hop drive, which is requisitioned aboard Red Dwarf that allows dimension crossing."

"That's a lie." The Doctor shook his head. "Dimension crossing is almost entirely impossible without incredibly negative consequences to the current dimension, we could destroy everything."

"I'm going to have to disagree with you Doctor, the crossing of dimensions is actually frightfully easy with the right tools." Kryten grinned smugly. "Of course you'd never get there in this thing, it's like an angry child with a napkin, no sense of delicacy. The Holly Hop Drive allows a clean jump between alternate universes. In fact, we could even use the drive to enter the void! If we were to use the Holly Hop Drive to introduce Ace back in to the main time line while we took respite in an alternate dimension, the tangent universe would be destroyed and we ourselves could then utilize the TARDIS to return to the main time line where the Dalek invasion will have been prevented with minimum damage to the fabric of space time! The TARDIS should be capable of leaving the alternate dimension in the rift caused by the drive if we time it correctly." The Doctor paused, his mouth open, before nodding in approval and placing his hands on his hips.

"Bit of a long shot, but I could see it working."

"One problem though, the drive is back on Red Dwarf." The entire crew let out a collective groan at the prospect of having to return to the ship that currently had a warrant out for their arrest. It appeared that their time to complain was direly limited, as the TARDIS was hurled to one side, a large explosion billowing in through the doors that were flung open by the impact. The Doctor stabilised himself, staring in horror at their attacker hovering in through the door.

"_THE DOCTOR, OUR ARCH NEMESIS. YOU SHALL NOT BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE. YOU MUST BE EXTERMINATED._"

* * *

_A/N: Hey there, sorry that all these chapters have been rather dialogue-y. ^_^; And my politics on time travel and what not are all over the place, I'm probably not in keeper with the rules of time travelling as set by Doctor Who but oh well, it's for the sake of the story. Thank you to all who have read this far!_


	9. Chapter 9

At the emergence of these unsightly metallic beings, screaming in a high pitched distorted bark, the entire crew froze save for Rimmer, who promptly fainted from overwhelming fright, and The Doctor, who placed his hands coolly in his pockets, his brow falling sternly and his lips pursing. He projected more intense irritation at this in than he did sorrow or bitterness or fear. Lister knew immediately that these Daleks and The Doctor had a long, troubled and tenacious history. Four Daleks had hovered on to the ship, a considerable number more forming an imprisoning ring around the outside of the TARDIS. Lister raised his hands in surrender as one of the Dalek swivelled and aimed his plunger-like protrusion at him.

"Don't attempt to run, don't attempt to shoot them, bullets won't work, barely..." The Doctor calmly informed the understandably panicked crew.

"_DOCTOR._" The first Dalek bleated. "_THERE IS LITTLE YOU CAN DO TO STOP THE GLORIOUS DALEK REGIME. OUR SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE GALAXY IS UNDERWAY. WE HAVE CONQUERED THE HUMANS. ONLY YOU REMAIN AND SOON YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED. THE ONE THAT YOU CALLED ACE RIMMER, HE IS NO LONGER A THREAT TO OUR REGIME EITHER, FOR WE HAVE EXTERMINATED HIM."_

"Ace?" Lister stepped forward but was curtly stopped by a silent gesture from the Doctor. "You're the ones who took Ace?" He gritted his teeth. The Doctor glanced sidelong slowly.

"Don't." He cautioned. "Of course they did, they removed him from time, he was supposed to stop them, but how could he do that if they erased him completely. In fact, this explains the signs of life that we were getting from the void."

"A-are they not robotic?" Kochanski asked.

"No, they're organic matter on the inside." The Doctor stepped forward, his nose almost touching the twitching luminous blue eye stalk of the Dalek that stood before him. "I will not rest until Ace has righted the wrongs that you exacted upon a race long before its time."

"_I THINK NOT. YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED._"

The Doctor dived to one side just in time to avoid a brutal but clean blast from the Daleks laser which ricocheted off the TARDIS wall and created a scorched hole in some of the console panelling, eliciting a large burst of sparks. The crew all recoiled in fear, quivering with eagerness to run but a harrowing knowledge that the Daleks would incinerate them before they even turned their backs without some guidance from the Doctor.

"_EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE._"

The Doctor rolled a couple of times like a hard shelled beetle before crashing in the railings at the other side of the TARDIS, just next to the stairs to the lower decks. The Dwarf crew were frozen, as the Daleks seemed to have no interest in exterminating them as of yet, but what followed let them knew that that was a fact soon to change:

"RUN! All of you, out the door just RUN!" The Doctor gestured manically to the door currently unblocked by Daleks. Kochanski took the first move, slamming her palms on to the knobbly surface of the Dalek in front of her and sending it wheeling around like a spinning top, ducking from the lasers that it fired incoherently in several directions. Simultaneously Lister drove the sole of his boot in the the Dalek confronting him, throwing it on to its back and sending more stray lasers flying in to the TARDIS inner walls. Lister skidded to a halt, despite the fact that Cat and Kryten had already leapt out of the orbiting TARDIS open and that the Daleks were still firing rapidly, remembering suddenly that Rimmer was still unconscious. He could have killed himself for even feeling a pang out doubt about whether to save him or not, wondering if he should just leave this Rimmer, knowing he'd have his Rimmer back sooner or later. That wasn't the kind of person that he was, and it tore him up that he could even possibly have become such a person. Heroically, he made a dive underneath Dalek fire for Rimmers limp form, scooping him up in his arms, looking very much like a dark Byronic hero carrying a wounded damsel to safety and made a run for the door, leaping out in to the open. Lister was suddenly in free fall after the Cat, Kochanski and Kryten, plummeting to the ground with no means of support. The TARDIS receded in to the white sky above until it became a blip. All seemed still, the boys and girl from the Dwarf locked in a hurtling free fall through bitter clouds of human ash. When all seemed hopeless, Kryten removed his head, activating a large balloon like object which burst out of his neck cavity noisily and messily like an air bag, making their impact to the ground considerably more cushioned. Thankfully, they had landed back in a non populous area, one with no life for the Daleks to exterminate to begin with like the one where they had hidden from the small rouge one for the last night. They all quickly scrambled from Kryten's rapidly deflating air bag, which he stuffed indignantly back into his torso, promptly reattaching his head.

"Never thought that I'd have to use that one!" He said, perplexed. "That was built in for minor, ground level space ship crashes! I've never been on a vehicle small enough to warrant using it!"

"Never mind that Kryten!" Lister quickly picked himself up, still cradling Rimmer. "The TARDIS may have been destroyed by those...things! What are we supposed to do now, The Doctor could be dead for all we know, h-how do we find Ace and set things right without the TARDIS?"

"I believe that all we really need now is the hop drive."

"But we're stuck here and those bloody...Dalek things are everywhere!" Lister screamed angrily.

"Dave, calm down!" A tearful Kochanski pleaded. "Please calm down! Look, we can manage this without the Doctor, we may just have to flag down the White Midget ships and allow ourselves to get captured!"

"And what, get thrown in the brig? The Daleks will find Red Dwarf eventually, they've found everything else, it's only a matter of time. We have to get off here somehow or the Daleks will destroy the hop drive and we'll be stuck in this tangent universe forever!"

"Sirs, ma'am, there are ways we can get back to the Dwarf while evading White Midget, we don't need the Doctors help for that!"

"But what about closing the tangent time line, if we reintroduce Ace immediately, it'll close with us in it and we'll be stuck here again, we need at least two vehicles capable of dimension travel in order to not be trapped with this fate!" Kochanski shouted, flapping her hands in agitation.

"We can find that here!" Kryten pointed out. "Think, this is an alien race, this is humanity at a far more advanced point, it shouldn't be too hard to slap together some sort of dimensional crossing machine with a little bit of elbow grease and espionage! All we need to do is avoid those ghastly robotic shuttlecocks and Robert's your fathers brother!"

"I'm listening."

"Now, I was built within a company that had strong ties to New Earth, my databases should be able to map the city in a matter of time, although I can't account for any changes that the Daleks may have made."

"Right, super, but can we stop standing around in this field?" Kochanski begged. "They can fly, they'll find us any minute!"

* * *

With that, hearts heavy at the apparent loss of both the TARDIS and the Doctor, the Dwarfers made their tentative way through the barren white plane which very much resembled moors of Yorkshire that they appeared to have crash landed in. The winter was crisp and biting, the wind whipping up the ash in to a storm and blinding them, rainstorms turning the ash and mud in to a thick mulch at their feet which they waded through with all the ease of treacle. Despite the fact that humanity appeared to be gone, it was life affirming to see a few solitary lapwings gliding overhead, or some bird of a similar silhouette. Their situation began to look increasingly futile as they found themselves fall prey to dehydration, hunger, fatigue and the utter disheartenment that the Doctor's seeming departure left hanging over their heads. The night only served to grow colder and more hostile. They could feel their knees buckling beneath them, threatening to give way at any point. It was not until long past midnight that the Cat smelled the faint burning of paraffin in the distance and guided them to the source which turned out to be a relic of a stone mansion, solitary in the wilderness. There was a faint but inviting light radiating from the misted windows, that seemed far too human to be threatening. It was a grand old anachronistic structure on New Earth, plucked straight from a Bronte novel, two bay windows flanking a great oak door, above which was carved _Rosebery Manor 2240 _surrounded by intricate floral, art nouveau curling and licking patterns, emphasising flow and shape and nature that had been heavily weathered by time, as this antiquity of a resting place was over a billion years old. Lister silently commended whoever had been able to maintain such a grand old structure which looked very much like it should have been built in 1890 rather than 2240.

Freezing cold, fingers numb and red, Lister reached forward and placed his shaking hands on the large mahogany door and pushed it open. It swung aside to reveal a grand hall, carpeted with a mould encrusted Persian rug that had obviously once been very beautiful, the remnants of a chandelier now a hanging beacon of cobwebs and decay. They could hear voices in the drawing room which they were eagerly drawn to. Inside the grand old room they found a group of five who all jumped for weapons at their arrival but withdrew them just as quickly upon realising they were human. Lister surveyed the group and blinked at them in disbelief, as they did to him.

"...Peterson?"

"Dave!" Peterson extended his arms as if beckoning for a hug. Lister was understandably dubious.

"Selby...Chen...Todhunter..." His gaze landed on the last member the party, the colour draining from his face "Kochanski?". The petite woman, boisterous grin and baby face framed by a brown bob and large quiff, sat wrapped in a silver gautex jacket, lit up upon seeing him.

"Dave!" Her cotton-candy Scottish voice rang out through the hollow old house. He looked at the other Kochanski, standing behind him with a look of utter perplexity. "This is just too strange..." Lister shook his head, glancing between Kochanski I and Kochanski II. He knew only Kochanski II was aware that they were essentially the same person in the same sense that Arnold Rimmer and Ace Rimmer had been, the same person, but conditioned differently, living two seperate lives. The atmosphere was tense, but forthright Todhunter stood, dusting his thick parka and running a hand through his well kept hair.

"Well, I understand that this is strange situation, Dave." He glanced in confusion at the unconscious Rimmer slung over Lister's shoulder briefly before continuing. "But you are fugitives, and we may have crash landed on this...godforsaken planet, but the minute a rescue mission is mounted, we're taking you to the brig! Red Dwarf is being brought here!"

"You can't do that sir!" Kryten cut in. "The Daleks will destroy it!"

"By Daleks, I assume you mean those things out there and worry not, strange mechanoid. Red Dwarf is decked within an inch of its life with perfectly capable personnel who can handle strange alien threats like this." Todhunter reassured him confidently.

"That's a lie. They're impervious to bullets." Kochanski added quietly.

"Haha, I'm sure we'll find something." Todhunter's smug joviality was hardly welcome in the circumstances. The group stood in silence for a long while before Todhunter turned on his heels and went to tend to a few cans of beans on a grate above a flaming canister, which Lister noticed was actually a disassembled and overturned Dalek. He marvelled at their prowess in the face of such awful creatures, feeling his own confidence in their safety grow somewhat. He backed away slowly through his peers and out of the drawing room, heading for the staircase with Rimmer still on his back. Kochanski turned to stop him, but found herself halted by some unguessable feeling within herself.

Upstairs, Lister found a particularly grand bedroom plucked from the most opulent recesses of Gothic literature, lush velvet damask curtains framing the dusty grandiose valley of thick quilts and mountainous stacked pillows that were deep red and trimmed with intricately golden embroidery. Carefully, he placed Rimmer on the bed and made a move to leave him there for the evening, when a voice stopped him.

"I've been awake for a while know, you know."

"I knew it." Lister turned around again, Rimmer now sat upright, propped on the pillows with cross legs and arms, grinning insufferably. "You probably just didn't want to walk."

"Golly no, I just didn't want to talk to those gimboids downstairs. They'd only mock me. So where are we?" Lister refused to answer, turning to leave, when Rimmer leapt from the cushy slab of a bed and wrenched him back by his arm, swinging him around so their noses touched.

"Or maybe I do want to talk to them. About _you and me_."

"_Fuck off._" Lister hissed.

"Why don't I lay you down some terms and conditions of this little bargain that we've entered, in exchange for my not prematurely outing you as the most undignified employee of the JMC besides myself, let's saaaay...You not only do your laundry, you clean your sock basket, you do my laundry, you cook my meals, you write my revision notes, you make me look like a cool guy, big me up to the ladies...you stop wearing those smeggy shirts, you fill out accident report forms, no more guitar, no more vindaloo, no more "Rastabilly Skank". You'll be subservient to me. My own personal whipping boy." Lister bit his bottom lip. Rimmer edged a little closer, a venomous teasing bite to his words. "Say you will, or I tell them now. Right now."

"You have no idea how happy I am that you're no longer a hologram." And with that Lister drew his fist back and drove it hard into Rimmer's jaw, sending him reeling backwards on to the bed. Rimmer attempted to collect himself and mount some kind of counter attack, pawing at the blood pooling in his mouth, but Lister moved far too quickly for him, shoving him backwards and straddling him, violently pounding Rimmer's face with his knuckles a second and third time. Rimmer managed to block the forth, clawing at Lister's shoulders and attempting to free himself, blotchy purple bruising forming beneath his eyes and at the corner of his lips. Rimmer managed to get a mildly forceful jab at Lister's left eye, strong enough to look as if it might swell, but it was hardly enough, Lister delivering another swift blow to Rimmer, this time in the stomach, winding him completely. Lister stopped, staring at the blood on his knuckles, the bruises on Rimmers face, hearing his own rough, riled breathing penetrate the silence that now lingered above them. Rimmer's head fell to outside as he coughed a little blood on to the dark red sheets. Lister reached gently, his hand cupping Rimmer's cheek, stroking the bruises he inflicted with his thumb. It was as if the two minds had simultaneously become one, if only for a flicker of a second, as Lister dived down, Rimmer reaching upwards and gripping Lister's shoulders, pulling him close, as they kissed. A drawn out, breathless, heavy kiss, mired somewhat by the blood in Rimmer's mouth. Their lips didn't part for quite some time. When they finally did, Lister could see that Rimmer looked thoroughly mortified with himself more than anyone. Lister climbed off Rimmer, stepping back and allowing the horrified Rimmer to storm out of the room, wiping his lips on his sleeve as he did so. Lister sighed, flopping limply on to a stool next to a dressing table adjacent to the bed.

"Smeg."


End file.
